Happy Bloomsday! Joyce's Contribution to the Modern Short Story

Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, which James Joyce made forever famous as the day Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus were out and about in "Dirty old Dublin" in the great novel Ulysses.

A few years ago, I took a group of students to Dublin for three weeks to study Ulysses and Dubliners in the city itself.  It was a grand time we had, for we were there for Bloomsday, and many of us had Gorgonzola cheese and red wine at Davy Byrnes pub just off Grafton Street.  And we had Guinness—lots and lots of Guinness. 

Today, I will have to content myself with having a Guinness in California alone—which is not as much fun as having a Guinness with friends in Dublin, but certainly better than not having a Guinness at all.

I have read Ulysses six times and would not mind talking a bit about it here.  But that novel, although it started as a short story, does not quite qualify for discussion on this blog.  Still I could not let Bloomsday pass without making a few comments about Joyce's contribution to the short story form.

Joyce's most famous contribution to the theory and technique of modern short narrative is his notion of the "epiphany," which he defined in his early novel Steven Hero:  "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.  He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."

 In a Joyce story, an epiphany is a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some revelatory aspect of human experience, some highly significant aspect of personal reality, usually communicated by a pattern of what otherwise would be seen as trivial details and events.  Joyce's technique is to transform the casual into the causal by repetition of seemingly trivial details until they are recognized as part of a significant pattern.  Two of Joyce's best-known stories, "Eveline" and "Araby," end with decisions or revelations that seem unprepared for until the reader reflects back on the story and perceives the patterned nature of what at first seem only casual detail.

In "Eveline," the reader must determine how Eveline's thoughts of leaving in Part I inevitably to her decision to stay in Part II.   Most of the story takes place while Eveline is sitting at the window watching the evening "invade" the avenue.  Nothing really "happens" in the present in the first part of the story, for her mind is on the past and the future, occupied with contrasting images of familiar/strange, duty/pleasure, earth/sea, entrapment/escape, death/life.  It is the counterpoint pattern of these images that prepares the reader for the last section of the story when Eveline stands among the crowds and decides not to leave her father and Ireland.

The problem is how to understand how the first part of the story, which focuses primarily on the bleakness of Eveline's past life at home and thus seems to suggest that she will decide to go with Frank, manages at the same time to suggest that she will decide to stay?  The basic tension is between the known and the unknown.  Although Eveline does not have many happy memories of her childhood and family life, at least they are familiar and comfortable.  Because these events have already happened, what "used to be" is still present and a part of her.  However, life with Frank, because it has not yet happened, is tinged with fear of the unknown, in spite of the fact that it holds the promise of romance and respect.  Thus, at the end, when she sets her face to him, passive, like a helpless animal, with no sign of love or farewell or recognition, we realize that her decision to stay is ultimately inexpressible.

What Joyce achieves in one of his most anthologized stories, "Araby," derives from Chekhov's experiments with creating symbols out of objects by their role or context, not by their preexisting symbolic meaning.  The primary counterpoint throughout the story consists of those images that suggest ordinary reality and those that suggest unknown romance.  The result is a kind of realism that is symbolic at the same time for the boy's spiritual romanticism is embodied in the realistic objects of his world. 

This is a story about the ultimate romantic projection, for the boy sees the girl as a religious object, a romantic embodiment of desire.  Her name is like a "summons" to all his "foolish blood," yet it is such a sacred name that he cannot utter it.  Her image accompanies him "even in places the most hostile to romance."  Thus, when he visits Araby, a place he fancies the most sympathetic to romance, what he seeks is a sacred object capable of objectifying all his unutterable desires. 

The conversation he overhears causes his realization precisely because of its trivial flirtatious nature, for what the boy discovers is that there is nothing so sacred that it cannot be made profane.  To see his holy desire for Mangan's sister diminished to mere physical desire is to see a parody of himself.  The result is the realization not only that he is driven and derided by vanity, but that all is vanity; there is no way for the sacred desires human beings store up in their ghostly hearts to be actualized and still retain their spiritual magic.

"The Dead" is the most subtle example of Joyce's innovative technique.  The first two-thirds of the story reads as if it were a section from a novel, as numerous characters are introduced and the details of the party are reproduced in great detail.  It is only in the last third, when Gabriel's life is transformed, first by his romantic and sexual fantasy about his wife and then by his confrontation with her secret life, that the reader reflects back on the first two-thirds of the story and perceives that the earlier concrete details and the trivial remarks are symbolically significant.  Thematically, the conflict that reflects the realistic/lyrical split in the story is the difference revealed to both Gabriel and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in actual experience and life perceived as desire.

The party portion of "The Dead" reflects Gabriel's public life; his chief interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly.  However, throughout the party period of the story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but as a mixture of memory and desire.  During their short carriage ride to the hotel, he indulges in his own self-delusion about his relationship with his wife: "moments of their life together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory."

When Gabriel discovers that Gretta has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he sees the inadequacy of his public self.  Michael Furey, who has been willing to sacrifice his life for love of another, challenges Gabriel's smug safety.  In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is.  "Generous tears" fill his eyes because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the untransformed life of the everyday. 

At the end, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, he loses his egoistic self and imaginatively merges into a mythic lyrical sense of oneness.  "The Dead" is not a story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story meaningful.

Happy Bloomsday to one and all!

"Wow!" vs. "Whoa!" in the Short Story

       
            In response to my recent piece on V. S. Pritchett, Pearl Street posted a comment on what Louis Menand once called the "whoa" effect of short stories. I referred to Menand's remark about his "not exactly a term of art" a dozen years ago in a paper I read on so-called "linked stories" or "short story sequences" at the Modern Language Association Meeting.  I thought it might be worth posting a few paragraphs from that paper.

                                            Wow Vs. Whoa in the Short Story

I must tell you at the outset--as perhaps the world’s oldest cheerleader for the short story as a genre--that I have some reservations about focusing on short stories as parts of a whole rather than as complete artistic entities in themselves.  Given the current trend in the literary marketplace, I could say that I am interested in protecting the marginalized short story from the hegemonic influence of the globalized strength of novelistic predominance, but an old formalist like me would never use language like that. 

My worry is that, precisely because of the hegemonic notion that bigger is better, focusing on the sequential nature of stories inevitably throws the focus on the novel side of the formula rather than on the short story side.  The question of what makes a short story sequence something other than a group of randomly assembled stories and also something other than a novel is worth examining.  I certainly do not want short stories to be read as if they were sections of a novel.  However, by the same token, I do not want them to be read as “part” of an overarching sequence, a tactic that may result in neglecting the unique characteristics of short stories as individual works of art.

It troubles me that James Nagel in The Contemporary American Short Story Cycle says that some readers have misinterpreted individual stories because they did not take into account that they have a book-length intertextual context.  The very word “misinterpret” suggests that one can not really read a story from, say Winesburg or Dubliners, individually, but only within the overall context of the sequence in which they were ultimately published.

I admit there is a certain pleasure involved when you read a story and run across a character you have met in a previous story.  Such character reappearances create pleasurable little shocks of recognition for the reader, a sort of “wow” factor that these characters actually live outside the fictions in which they exist and have been hanging around just waiting for another story in which to pop up.

For example,  although Stuart Dybek’s collection, I Sailed with Magellan, was promoted by his publisher as a “novel-in-stories,” the only thing novelistic about it is that some of the same characters appear in all the stories.  In an interview, Dybek said that the overall narrative line of such linked story collections as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and James Joyce’s Dubliners doesn’t even begin to suggest what they are about, for such books do not assume that life is a neat pattern of cause and effect.  Thus, to call I Sailed with Magellan an ethnic “coming-of-age novel” about a young Polish-American growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s is to minimize the universal power of the eleven individual stories, for each one is a self-contained, lyrically powerful, literary experience.

In the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand, in a long review essay on John Updike’s The Early Stories, says that if you try to name the sensation that an individual story delivers, you might call it a general sense of  “Whoa,” which, he admits, is not exactly a term of art, but you know it when you feel it--that shiver of recognition of the “whatness of a thing” being revealed when you read “Snow was general all over Ireland.” 

Basically, I guess, I prefer this “whoa” feeling when a single story comes completely yet inexpressibly together over the “wow” feeling of running across the same characters, settings, or themes in several stories sequentially arranged stories. 

The short story's dependence on a tightly controlled structure rather than a linear plot and mimetic methods has been one of its central aesthetic characteristic since Poe adapted from A. W. Schlegel a new meaning of the term plot as being "that from which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole."  By this one stroke, Poe shifted the reader's narrative focus from mimetic events to aesthetic pattern.  Julio Cortazar has reaffirmed that “intensity in a story consists of the elimination of all the filler and transitional material that the novel permits and even demands.”  This need for the elimination of all transitional material is suggested by C. S. Lewis as the human need to transcend temporality to achieve some atemporal understanding:  "In real life, as in a story, something must happen,” says Lewis.  “That is just the trouble.  We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied.”

Many years ago I argued that the short story “way of seeing” was like that which Ernst Cassirer says characterizes perceiving the world in a mythic way.  When Alice Munro says she is primarily interested in “emotion,” she echoes Cassirer’s argument that within mythical perception “Whatever is seen or felt is surrounded by a special atmosphere.”  In this realm, says Cassirer, we cannot speak of things as dead or indifferent stuff, but all “objects are benign or malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and threatening.”  

This also reflects Raymond Carver’s conviction that,  "It's possible in … a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power."  It’s also what John Dewey means by the difference between an emotionally charged experience phenomenologically encountered and experience discursively understood.  As Dewey makes clear, an experience is recognized as such precisely because it has a unity, "a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts.” 

Moreover, although the novel may focus on cause and effect in time, the short story accepts the fact that what makes characters do what they do is not so simple.  Flannery O’Connor once said she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road from her, and when she returned them the woman said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor agreed that when you write stories you have to show how “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”  

               Part of the reason for this sense of an elusive and mysterious “secret” life of the characters of short stories derives from its origins in the folk tale and later the romance form.  Whereas the focus of the novel is often on multiple inner consciousnesses, the focus of the short story is more often on an obsessed inner consciousness.  Characters in short fiction seem somewhat like allegorical figures because of their obsessive focus on some single task: Goodman Brown's journey into the forest, Old Phoenix's trip to get the healing medicine, Bartleby's preference not to, Nick Adam's fishing trip at Big, Two-Hearted River.  Obsessiveness—centering the attention on an activity, a person, and a belief--is a limiting, formal process that can be identified as a pattern or structure.  Although in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Gabriel's mind wanders through a number of memories, thoughts, objects, tasks, etc. there is a discernible pattern to his thoughts and preoccupations or else the story would not end with the revelatory sense of transcendence and meaningful closure that it does.

A number of narratologists have noted the basic tension in story between sequence and  significance.  Frank Kermode  calls it the tension between narrative sequence and “secrets.”  And “Secrets,” says Kermode, are at odds with sequence.”  Paul Ricoer calls it the tension between the episodic dimension, which refers to the story as events, and the configurational dimension, “according to the which the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events.”  As Ricoeur says, every narrative combines these two dimensions in various proportions.”  Most great short-story writers suggest that the short story is more configurational than sequential. 

 The hidden story, of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood is always about something more unspeakable, more mysterious, than the story generated by the reader’s focus on characters and on what happens next.  The genius of great short stories is that whereas they could indeed be the seedbed of novels, they do not communicate as novels do.  And if we try to read them as if they were parts of novels, they will never haunt us with their mystery. However, this mystery is not easy to describe.

As Louis Menand said in his 2003 piece in The New Yorker: "The difficulty of putting into words the effect a story produces is part of the point.  The story is words; the effect is wordless, or at best, whoa."

V.S. Pritchett: Neglected British Master of the Short Story

Two observations on which most writers and critics agree about V.S. Pritchett are:  (1) He was one of England's best short-story writers. (2) He has always been unfairly ignored. 

Dean R. Baldwin, in one of the few studies of Pritchett (V.S. Pritchett. Boston: Twayne, 1987), rightly observes that neglect of Pritchett is largely due to the fact that his most lasting contribution are his short stories. The fact that "neglect" and "short stories" somehow often seem to be linked should be no surprise to readers of this blog, who know that short stories have often been ignored because of a critical bias for the big over the small, action over language, and the social over the artistic.

Because I have battled these biases throughout my career, I am always delighted when a publisher has the gumption to go against them and makes forgotten short-story writers newly available.

Turnpike Books (London), who has previously published handy handsome paperback collections of A.E. Coppard (Weep Not My Wanton) and J. B. Priestly (What a Life!), has now published a selection of eight stories by V.S. Priestly entitled On the Edge of the Cliff.  They were kind enough to send me a copy.  I posted an essay on the Coppard collection earlier on this blog.

Not to be confused with a Random House 1979 edition of the same name (the title of one of the stories), Turnpike's edition of On the Edge of the Cliff, contains eight of Pritchett's most memorable stories. In addition to the title story: "Wheelbarrow," "Citizen," "The Wedding," "The Speech," "A Debt of Honor," "The Cage Birds," and "The Skeleton."

If you associate British short stories with genteel drawing room comedies or superficial social satires, then you haven't read V. S. Pritchett. In the opening story, "Wheelbarrow," for example, the central character is a "natural destroyer," who looks like some "hard-living, hard-bitten doll," a taxi-driver, who "captures" a woman and takes over assisting her ready an inherited house for sale. Squatting like an imp or devil, he tells her about a vision he had in a mine that converts him from being a gambler and a fornicator to a pious Christian. The story becomes a back-and-forth battle between the two involving temptation, lust, coveting, avarice. It is a classic example of how the short story creates a "realistic" story that is simultaneously a mythic story that focuses on the "secret life."

Adrian Hunter, in his 2007 book, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, suggests that Pritchett regards the short story "fundamentally at odds with the English cultural imaginary," which is ruminative. Hunter explains Pritchett's failure to find respect in the academy by locating him unpalatably between modernist formalism and old fashioned social satire.

In the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981), Pritchett says the short story springs from a poetic rather than a prosaic impulse, which suggests that things that are left out are there all the time and that it approaches the mythical.  The short story writer, he says is not sustained by the discursive like the novelist but rather the distinctiveness of his voice and the ingenuity of his design. He says a good storyteller knows he is putting on a "personal, individual act."  The short story, says Pritchett, knows that our "restless lives achieve shape at times and our emotions have their architecture."

In one of the most recent pieces on Pritchett, (New Statesman, 6 February 2012), the great short story writer William Trevor agrees with Elizabeth Bowen that the form is "a child of our time," at the very "heart of modernity" in its "matter-of-fact brevity," its "sense of urgency, its glimpsing manner, its stab of truth."  All of this, he says, was waiting for V.S. Pritchett, who "gratefully reached out for it, prized it, and indelibly left his mark on it." And indeed, Pritchett has shown himself more appreciative and proficient in the unique characteristics of the short story than most British writers of the twentieth century.

In a 1953 piece in Harper's Bazaar, Pritchett noted that whereas novels are bemusing, the short story, on the other hand," wakes the reader up.”  Like other short story writers before and after him, Pritchett argues that the form answers the "primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience." 

In a 1985 interview (John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview.  NY: Methuen),  he says he likes Chekhov's stories because they are so open-ended and he tries to do that too, to leave things hanging.  "it's terribly difficult for English writers to do, since some sort of practical or responsible sense works against it.  We tend to lack the courage to leave it like that, and we don't know what 'that' is."

In the same interview, Pritchett says, "Writing short stories is like writing sonnets or a lyrical poem: it's strictly disciplined, it has to be highly concentrated, and it has to suggest a world much larger than it appears to be doing in its space.... I have always wanted to pursue intensity, and a long time ago I became infatuated with the Idea of 'essences'--essences of behavior--which I got out of reading Croce in Spanish. Croce made a great impression on me as a young man, and I thought: 'Yes, I don't want the whole cake, I want the essence.'"

Pritchett says one of the delightful things about the short story is it is like looking a picture, for you can see the whole thing at once. He also says its intensity attracts him. In his introduction to a collection of Mary Lavin's stories, he said that the Irish short story writer tends to concentrate on the discrepancy between ordinary, everyday life and the self's hidden life."

In the Preface to his Collected Stories (1982), Pritchett talked about how story-writing was "exacting work," and that so-called "real life" is "useless until art reveals what life merely suggested." He says that although he laboured at novels, he was really attracted to "concision, intensity, reducing possible novels to essentials." He adds that he has always thought the short-story writer is a mixture of reporter, aphoristic wit, moralist and poet—though not "poetical." He says the short-story writer is like a ballad-maker and in the intricacy of his designs like a writer of sonnets, like an architect.  The short story, he argues, is not simply read, but re-read again and again.

If you are familiar with my own discussions of the short story in this blog, and in my essays, reviews, and books, you will also find Pritchett's comments on the form familiar. The characteristics of the form Pritchett identifies, and which I have argued for over the years are as follows:

1.      The short story is poetic rather than prosaic.

2.      Things that seem left out are there all the time in short stories.

3.      The short story approaches the mythical. 

4.      The short story is sustained  by the distinctiveness of the writer's voice.

5.      The short story is sustained by ingenuity of its design.

6.      A good storyteller knows he is putting on a "personal, individual act."  

7.      The short story knows that our lives achieve shape at times and our emotions have       their architecture.

8.      The short story reflects a primitive craving for art and beauty of shape, the longing       to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience. 

9.      Short stories are like lyrical poems--strictly disciplined, concentrated.

10.  The short story must suggest a world larger than it appears to be doing.

11.  The short story is not simply read, but re-read again and again.

12.  The short story deals with "essences" of behavior.

If you appreciate the short story and have not read V. S. Pritchett's short stories, Turnpike Books' Edge of the Cliff is a good place to start. He knew the form well—perhaps too well to be well-received by popular readers who prefer long rambling "real life" or academic critics who prefer social significance.

Short Story Month 2015--Guy de Maupassant, "La Horla"

After the success of Boule de Suif ("Ball of Fat")  in 1880, the touching little story of the prostitute who reluctantly goes to bed with a Prussian officer in order to procure the release of her traveling companions and then is scorned by them, Guy de Maupassant began to write anecdotal articles for two newspapers, the practice of which served as preparation for writing the short stories that were to make him famous.

His first full volume of short fiction appeared in 1881 under the title of his second important story, La Maison Tellier ("Madame Tellier's House"), a comic piece about a group of prostitutes who attend a First Communion. After the success of this book, Maupassant published numerous stories in newspapers and periodicals which were then reprinted in the volumes of his stories that began to appear at the rate of approximately two a year. Many of his stories created a great deal of controversy among the French critics of the time because he dared to focus on the experiences of so-called "lowlife" characters.

However, in addition to the realistic stories of the lower-class, Maupassant also experimented with mystery tales, many of which are reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.  Instead of depending on the supernatural, these stories focus on some mysterious dimension of reality which is justified rationally by the central character.  As a result, the reader is never quite sure whether this realm exists in actuality or whether it is a product of the obsessed mind of the narrator.

The year 1884 saw the publication of Maupassant's most famous short story, La Parure, usually translated as "The Necklace," which has become one of the most famous short stories in any language. Indeed, it has become so famous that it is the story which most commonly comes to mind when Maupassant's name is mentioned, in spite of the fact that most critics agree that Maupassant's creation of tone and character in such stories as Boule de Suif and La Maison Tellier are much more representative of his genius than this ironically-plotted little trick story about the woman who wasted her entire life to pay back a lost necklace, only to discover that it was fake.

La Horla, a story of psychological horror, is actually the pinnacle of several stories of madness which Maupassant had experimented with previously.  The story focuses on the central character's intuition of a reality which surrounds human life but remains imperceptible to the senses.  Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own madness as well as his lucid understanding of the process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.

What makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to account for his madness as being due to something external to himself.  Such a desire is Maupassant's way of universalizing the story, for he well knew that human beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible presence. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which is indeed the very basis of hallucination. The story is too strongly controlled to be the work of a madman.

Of all the Maupassant tales that focus on madness, hallucination, obsession, and the mystery of a dimension beyond the senses, the most sustained and deservedly the most famous is "The Horla."  Although many critics point to the autobiographical elements in this story (for during its writing Maupassant was possessed by the increasing madness caused by syphilis), still others suggest that the work stands on its own merits as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own madness as well as his understanding of the process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.

The story begins with many of the same themes that Maupassant had earlier developed in "Letter from a Madman," even at times using much of the same language as that story.  The narrator begins considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to perceive all that is out there in the world, and the theory that if there were other senses, one could discover many more things about the world around human life.  The second predominant Maupassant theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a presentiment of something yet to come.  This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and the conviction that there is something following him; yet when he turns around there is nothing there.

This sense of something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual creatures who exist in this invisible dimension.  This conviction is then developed into an idea that when the mind is asleep an alien being takes control of the body and makes it obey. All of these ideas then lead easily into the concept of mesmerism or hypnotism; for under hypnosis it seems as if an alien being has control of our actions which, when we awake, we have no awareness of.  Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he also feels he is in complete possession of all his faculties, and he becomes even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his own mind does not direct him to do.  Thus he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who have always existed and who have haunted mankind even though they cannot be seen.

The final event to convince him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of the creatures, is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil in which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures who feed on them during sleep.  He remembers a Brazilian ship that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped ship to possess him.  Now he knows that the reign of man on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla which man has always feared--forces called spirits, genii, fairies, hobgoblins, witches, devils, and imps--will enslave man.

Finally, in a scene which was used earlier in "A Letter from a Madman," he "sees" the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like man, be prematurely destroyed.  His final thought is since the Horla is not dead he shall have to kill himself; the story ends with that decision.

What makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to account for his madness as being something external to himself.  This universalizes the story, for human beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible presence named gods, devils, spirits, etc. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which is the very basis of hallucination.

Because of his ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the complex mind of man, Maupassant is an important figure in marking the transition between the nineteenth-century tale of the supernatural and the twentieth-century short story of psychological obsession.

Guy de Maupassant is one of those writers whose contribution to literature is often overshadowed by the tragic facts of his life and whose real experimentation is often ignored in favor of his more popular innovations.  Too often it is his promiscuity and profligate Parisian life style that receives the most attention from the casual reader.  As if to provide evidence for the payment Maupassant had to make for such a lifestyle, these readers then point to the supposed madness-inspired story La Horla--a fit ending for one who not only wrote about prostitutes but paid for their dangerous favors as well with his life.

However, Maupassant's real place as a writer belongs with such innovators of the short-story form as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry.  Too often, whereas such writers as Turgenev and Chekhov are admired for their so-called lyricism and realistic vignettes, writers such as Bierce and O. Henry are scorned for their so-called cheap narrative tricks.  Maupassant falls somewhere in between.  On the one hand, he indeed mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number of characters in a luminous situation. The Soviet short-story writer Isaac Babel has perhaps paid the ultimate tribute to Maupassant in one of his stories by noting how Maupassant knew the power of a period placed in just the right place.

Maupassant had as much to do with the development of the short-story genre in the late nineteenth century Chekhov did. in somewhat different ways.  However, because such stories as "The Necklace" seem so deceptively simple and trivial, his experiment with the form has often been ignored.  Not until the short story itself receives the recognition it deserves as a respectable literary genre will Guy de Maupassant receive the recognition he deserves for his contribution to the perfection of the form.

Short Story Month--2015--Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Sharer"

As Eudora Welty once said, "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery.  And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again.  Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement.  As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful" (164). The implication of this awareness of “mystery” is that the short story often seems to focus on a moment out of time, or on time as mythically perceived, the way Ernest Cassirer and Mircea Eliade have described it.

  More so than in the novel, the short story most often deals with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible logical, sociological, or psychological cause.  As Welty says, the "first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own.  It is wrapped in an atmosphere.  This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initial obscures its plain, real shape" (163).  To Conrad’s Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the "meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

Joseph Conrad confronts the problem of manifesting the secret, hidden life in the external world explicitly in his two most famous short works.  In "The Heart of Darkness" he creates a world like that of "Young Goodman Brown," in which landscape symbolically represents the ultimate reaches of psychic reality; moreover he develops a plot structure very much like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," in which a realistic narrator confronts a metaphoric extremist

In "The Secret Sharer," Conrad seeks a method to reveal the secret conflict of his protagonist by having the young captain project that conflict outside of himself.  Just as Hamlet creates a play within a play to externalize his conflict so that he can cope with it, the captain in Conrad's story creates the character of Leggatt to provide him with the means by which he can deal with his own insecurity and establish his own identity.  Conrad pushes to metaphoric extremes the common psychological phenomenon of inner conflict creating a split in the self so that it seems as if there are two separate voices engaged in a dialogue. 

Leggatt, whose name suggests he is a representative or emissary, is the objectified side of the captain's Hamlet-like, preoccupied, subjective self.  The story thus is torn between the plot, which focuses on the efforts of the captain to protect and conceal the mysterious stranger, and the mind of the captain, which obsessively persists in perceiving and describing the stranger as his other self, his double.  Although some critics have suggested that the constant repetition of the similarity between the captain and Leggatt is tedious and the weakest part of the work, the repetition is a purposeful Conrad tactic of overdetermination to suggest both that Leggatt is a romance-like symbolic projection of the captain's psyche and at the same time a real character with his own objective existence to whom the captain reacts in an obsessive way.

The  story begins with the central motif of the captain's lack of identity.  He says he is not only a stranger on the ship but also a stranger to himself, and he wonders if he will "turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." And indeed, many metaphorical details in the story suggest Leggatt has been summoned forth from the captain's unconscious as an aspect of the self with which he must deal.

 For example, Leggatt is first seen as a silvery, fish-like naked body emerging from the sea to whom the captain responds in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were expecting him.  The image of the captain looking straight down into a face upturned exactly under his own is clearly an allusion to the myth of Narcissus.  However, instead of the captain falling into his reflection, as in a number of German romantic tales, the reflection comes out of the mirror-like sea and takes on a problematical independent existence.  After Leggatt puts on one of the captain's sleeping suits, the captain says, it was "as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror."

In Conrad's story the mysterious mythic emissary from the unconscious is presented as an objective existence in the world, not as a dreamlike or allegorical projection.  Although we know that others have seen Leggatt as an objective presence before the story begins, no one but the captain sees him during the actual events of the story.  The anecdote of the scorpion in the inkwell is the mise en abyme in "The Secret Sharer" in which we see the entire story reflected in miniature.  Leggatt comes out of the inky water of the sea, which represents both the unconscious of the captain/Conrad and the inkwell source of all stories, the Ocean of Story.  At the end of "The Secret Sharer," Leggatt's movement back into the sea, representing the captain's reintegration of the split in his self, is his movement back into the inkwell.  Leggatt, the oneiric creation of both the captain and the artist, says "I am off the face of the earth now.  As I came at night so shall I go."

Making manifest that which is hidden is the primarily structural force of "The Secret Sharer."  This objectification of inner reality marks the beginning of the “modern” mythical method of fictional narration, as Thomas Mann defines it in his famous essay, "Freud and the Future."  Mann explicitly calls for a modern fiction that mixes the psychological and the mythical, for he affirms as truth the Schopenhauer‑Freud perception that life itself is a "mingling of the individual elements and the formal stock‑in‑trade; a mingling in which the individual, as it were, only lifts his head above the formal and impersonal elements."  Much of the "extra‑personal," Mann insists, "much unconscious identification, much that is conventional and schematic, is none the less decisive for the experience not only of the artist but of the human being in genera. (421)." 

Our interest in fictional characters, Mann implies, is, regardless of the events in which they are enmeshed, always centrally located in the process by which they try to find their identity, the means by which they attempt to answer the age‑old Oedipal question:  Who am I?  In such a process the two forces of the subjective and the schematic are decisive.  As Robert Langbaum has described it, when you realize that introspection leads to nothing but endless reflection, you see that the only way to find out who you are is to don a mask and step into a story.  "The point is," says Langbaum, "at that level of experience where events fall into a pattern. . . they are an objectification of your deepest will, since they make you do things other than you consciously intend; so that in responding like a marionette to the necessities of the story, you actually find out what you really want and who you really are" (175). 

This creation of an "as-if" real character to embody psychic processes marks the impressionistic extension of the romantic trend that began the short story form earlier in the nineteenth century.

Much of the reason for this sense of an elusive and mysterious “secret” life of the characters of short stories derives from its origins in the folk tale and later the romance form.  Whereas the focus of the novel is often on multiple inner consciousnesses, the focus of the short story is more often on an obsessed inner consciousness.  Characters in short fiction seem somewhat like allegorical figures because of their obsessive focus on some single task: Goodman Brown's journey into the forest, Old Phoenix's trip to get the healing medicine, Bartleby's preference not to, Nick Adam's fishing trip at Big, Two-Hearted River.  The hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood is always about something more unspeakable, more mysterious, than the story generated by the reader’s focus on characters and on what happens next. 

The genius of the short story form is that whereas short stories often could indeed be the seedbeds of novels, they do not communicate as novels do.  And if we try to read them as if they were novels, they will never haunt us with their sense of that mysterious secret life within all of us.

Short Story Month 2015--O. Henry, "The Cop and the Anthem"

O. Henry poses the same problem for a history of the short story as Bret Harte does, for as with Harte, O. Henry's influence far exceeds his excellence as a short-story writer.  However, like Harte, O. Henry was the right man at the right time, a writer who pushed the well-made formal nature of the short story to its furthest extreme.  O. Henry--a local colorist writer focusing on the city of New York who so emphasized the ironic pattern of his stories that his name has become associated with the formulaic short story.  O. Henry's popularity and his output was unprecedented.  By l920, nearly five million copies of his books were sold in the U.S.   Ironically, while he was being scolded by the serious critics in America, who preferred the more serious slice- of-life stories of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in Russia, serious critics were praising O. Henry for his mastery of the complex conventions of story-telling.

With O. Henry, the endings of stories became a formalization of the kind of ironic reversals that Boccaccio had made popular during the Renaissance.  Boris Ejxenbaum was one of the first critics to recognize that what O. Henry had discovered was something about the short story that was unique and characteristic of the form.  In his brief study, O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story, he argued that the short story and the novel were not only different but inherently at odds, for while the novel is a syncretic form developed from collections or stories or complicated by manners and morals material, the short story is a fundamental or elementary form.  The difference between the two is a difference in essence, said Exjenbaum, a difference conditioned by the distinction between big and small forms.  Admittedly basing his analysis largely on the stories of O. Henry, he argued that the story was constructed on the basic of some contradiction or incongruity whereby, by itself very essence the story amassed its whole weight toward its ending.

As Eichenbaum has said, there is something of the structure of the joke about short stories in that they depend on the ending.  However, the question here is why did Chekhov move away from the snappy ending while O. Henry continued to make it his forte?  This may be an example of the usual prejudice against the short story or else a misunderstanding of what constitutes its basic nature. There is obviously some relationship between the structure of the short story and the structure of the joke, but there is obviously an important difference.  What needs to be distinguished is the basic underlying structure of the joke (Freud may be the best help for this, as well as Koestler and other students of creativity) and the use of this structure for more serious material.  Mickey Spillane once said that the only reason people listen to a joke or read a story is to find out how it ends. Thus jokes are closed forms with a punch line, whereas the open short story (like Eastman's notion of open parable) does not focus on closure in the traditional sense.  I must check Kermode here on the notion of endings.

O. Henry wrote so many short stories so rapidly that he became the quintessential example of Edward O'Brien's accusation that the short story had become a machine-made product.  However, his best-known stories are those that reflect the kind of reverse ending that he was famous for: "The Gift of the Magi," "Mammon and the Archer," "The Cop and the Anthem," "The Furnished Room" and "A Municipal Report," perhaps his most respected story.  O. Henry is the writer with which Frederick Pattee ends his class history of the development of the short story, Pattee citing him as the master of "That reminds me of another" story, but a writer, for all his smooth slick style, of no depth, no thought, no philosophy, no moral complexity.  The problem of O. Henry is that he is a master of technique, and to cite him as a representative short story writer is simply to say that technique is more important for the short story than them.  This does not mean, however, that there is no thematic/structural complexity in O. Henry's stories, as a brief look at "The Cop and the Anthem" will show.

 At the turn of the century the name O. Henry was synonymous with the short story as a form.  And for many readers still, the notion of what a short story is derives from the kind of trick or twist ending associated with such O. Henry stories as "The Gift of the Magi," that sentimental story about the poor young couple--he who sold his watch to buy combs for her long hair and she who sold her hair to a wig-maker to buy a chain for his gold watch.  Not many O. Henry stories deal with serious issues in a serious way; they are either sentimental or else they are comically ironic.  "The Cop and the Anthem" is of the latter kind, but just because it does not carry a heavy theme or a serious idea does not mean that it will not repay a close study.

"The Cop and the Anthem" can be used to make students sensitive to the importance of point of view and ironic structure.  The first thing students might notice about this story is the language, riddled as it is with high-sounding esoteric words.  Students might be asked to characterize someone who says "cognizant of the fact that" rather than "knew," or "eleemosynary" rather than "charitable."  The technique O. Henry uses here is to give the storyteller language typical of the central character, Soapy, the bum, as a way of mildly ironically mocking him.  The language makes Soapy sound important, and indeed the irony of his character and situation is that although he is a bum, he acts as if he is of a high social status. 

Indeed the character of Soapy is as important to this story as its ironic structure, in which every action that he takes creates a reaction opposite to the one he wishes.  The basic irony of the story is that as long as Soapy is "free," that is, loose in the city, he is not free at all, because of the coming winter.  However, if he were in prison, he would indeed be "free" to enjoy life without fear.  However, Soapy does not want something for nothing; he is willing to pay for his room and board by going to some effort to commit an act that, according to the law, will get him in jail.  He knows that what society calls charity is not charity at all, but that he will have to "pay" for philanthropy by being preached at and lectured to.

The additional problem, of course, is that although Soapy breaks the law, he does not act like a criminal.  Moreover, although Soapy tries to be a "crook" there are real crooks out there, such as the umbrella thief, who thwart him, for he finds he cannot really steal from one who has already stolen.  Finally, there are those, such as the streetwalker, who although they might not look as if they were outside the law, are indeed criminals; one cannot violate the legal rights of one who is outside the law. 

Thus, Soapy seems "doomed to liberty."  Of course, a story with an ironic, mocking tone such as this one, in which a bum who talks like a gentleman tries to get himself thrown into jail but continually fails, can only end one way.  The ultimate irony of course is that Soapy, who does not want something for nothing and who goes to a great deal to get thrown into jail, finally does get thrown into jail for doing precisely nothing. 

Short Story Month 2015--George Moore, "Julia Cahill's Curse" and "Homesickness"

In Ireland, the beginnings of the modern short story is credited to George Moore.  Such critics of the short story as H. E. Bates and Frank O'Connor have both suggested that the modern Irish short story begins with Moore, particularly in l903 with the publication of The Untilled Field.  Many critics have agreed with Moore's own typically immodest assessment that the book was a "frontier book, between the new and the old style" of fiction. Letter of March l, l9l5, to Edmund Gosse.  Moore felt that The Untilled Field was his best work, boasting that he wrote the stories to be models for young Irish writers in the future.        

And indeed as many critics have suggested, the book had an influence on the collection of short stories that has become perhaps the most influential short story collection in the 20th century, James Joyce's Dubliners.  As Graham Hough has suggested, although no writer has carried farther than Joyce "a dual allegiance to an exhaustive naturalism on the one hand and a complex aesthetic symbolism on the other.... Dubliners has an obvious ancestor in Moore's stories in The Untilled Field." 

However, no one has really looked very carefully at the nature of Moore's short stories, especially in such a way as to suggest how they are so typical of the short story genre.  One can certainly agree with Hough and others that the stories seem unique for their time in combining the content of French naturalism with the concern for style of the fin de siecle aesthetics; however, this does not really give us a means by which to approach the individual stories.  For there is another important element about Moore's short stories which contributes to their story nature--that is, their allegiance to the folk tale form.  "Art begins in the irresponsible imaginations of the people," said Moore in Avowals, and "as literature rises out of speech it must always retain the accent of speech."

Moreover, no one has looked very closely at another aspect of Moore's view of story, that is, his notion that reality itself must be understood by means of story.  In "Recollections" and "Thoughts" about Moore, both John Eglinton and  W. B Yeats suggest that Moore felt he could understand a subject if he could see it as "story." Eglinton says that Moore felt he possessed a special faculty of this sort that distinguished him from others, and Yeats adds that he would do anything to make "his audience believe that the story running in his head at the moment had happened, had only just happened."

This allegiance to the folk tale form, the primal origins of story itself, and this need to understand reality by means of story can be clearly seen in one of Moore's best-known and most anthologized stories from The Untilled Field--"Julia Cahill's Curse."  "Julia Cahill's Curse" is a slight piece, but a fairly clear example of Moore's effort to use the folk tale mode as a means to understand social reality.  The basic situation is that of a story being told by a driver to the first-person narrator, who hearing the name, Julia Cahill, urges the driver to tell him her story.  The story, which indeed constitutes the bulk of "Julia Cahill's Curse," is of an event that took place twenty years previous when the Priest Father Madden had Julia put out of the parish, and consequently Julia put a curse on the parish that every year a roof would fall in and a family would go to America.  The basic conflict in the tale is between Julia, who in her dancing and courting, represents free pagan values, and the Priest, who, in his desire to restrain Julia, represents church control of such freedom.        

After preaching in church that Julia is the evil spirit that makes men mad, Father Madden threatens to change Julia's father into a rabbit if he does not turn her out.  The teller of the tale has no verification of the Priest's words, since all those who were in church that day have either died or gone to America, nor does he have anything more than hearsay that Julia was seen raising her arms to the sky to curse the village;  however, as the teller and listener near the village itself and the listener sees the ruins of the houses, the listener reflects, "I could see he believed the story, and for the moment I, too, believed in an outcast Venus becoming the evil spirit of a village that would not accept her as divine."      

The conflict between Julia and the priest is clear enough; however it is the relationship between the teller and the listener that constitutes the structural interest of the story, for what the tale is really about is the nature of story used to understand social reality.  What we have here is an actual event of social reality that has been mythicized by the teller and thus by the village folk both to explain and to justify the breakdown of Irish parish life in the late nineteenth century.  The teller of the tale believes that the desertion of the parish is due to Julia's curse.  The listener of the tale does not believe in the curse in this literal way but, as he says, for the moment he too believes it, at least in some way that is not made explicit.  It is the nature of the belief that constitutes the difference and thus the significance of the story.  Whereas the folk may believe such a tale literally, the modern listener believes it in a symbolic way.  And indeed, what Moore does here is to present a story that is responded to within the story itself in both the old way and the new way, that is, as a literal story of magic and as a symbolic story to account for the breakdown of the parish life--the tension between  pagan freedom and Church control.  Thus, "Julia Cahill's Curse" is a clear example of Moore's use of story to understand social reality.      

Frank O'Connor singles out "Home Sickness" as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century, arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short story as opposed to the tale" (37).  Although O'Connor says that as a piece of artistic organization, "Home Sickness" is perfect, one's first impression of the story is of its structural simplicity. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of health," and for a short time considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there.  What unifies the story beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone throughout of Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live within a sort of reverie of nostalgia which he is disappointed to find unrealized in reality. He takes no interest in the life of the people and does not so much decide to marry Margaret Dirken as he passively allows the impending marriage to be announced.

Although Bryden finds himself longing for the Bowery as he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence of the people around him with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind him," and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who cling to religious authority as his reason to return to America; the conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by unifying the detached dream-like mood of reverie that has been counterpointed throughout against Irish village reality. For the story is truly about the unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.        

The style of the story shifts in the penultimate paragraph from what at first seems like a straightforward realistic presentation of Bryden's detached disappointment with Irish life to a compressed summary account of his ordinary and uneventful life in America.  After his wife has died and his children are married, he sits in front of the fire, an old man, and "a vague, tender reverie" of Margaret floats up to his consciousness.  "His wife and children passed out of mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed, and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense."

The final lyrical paragraph of the story seems in sharp contrast to the realistic style of what has preceded it, in a way that is very similar to the  contrast between realism and concluding lyricism that characterizes Joyce's "The Dead":  "There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken.  The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes around it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills."

 However, as in "The Dead," the concluding lyrical style is not so much in contrast to the former style of the story as it first appears, for what Moore has accomplished is what characterizes the so-called "modern" style of Chekhov, Anderson, and Joyce.  What seems to be mere verisimilitude in the story actually is a subtle development of a unified tone of reverie and memory that dominates over the description of everyday reality.  Although the story on the surface seems to focus on external reality, the real emphasis, as is so often the case with Chekhov and Joyce, is on inner life, for which the details of external reality are significant either only by contrast or as images of subjective reality.  Although the concluding revelation of the "unchanging, silent life" of Bryden at first seems unprepared for, much as the lyrical evocation of Gabriel's life does in "The Dead," a closer look at the story reveals that the entire story is dominated by images that suggest the predominance of the subjective life of reverie and imagination over the ordinary life of the everyday.      

This typically modern theme of presenting the predominance of the inner life of imagination over that of the everyday can be seen in almost a paradigmatic form in "The Clerk's Quest." Edward Dempsey, the "obscure, clandestine, taciturn" little clerk, is the quintessential embodiment of what Frank O'Connor has called the "little man" who has predominated in the short story form since Gogol's Akakey Akakeivitch and Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener.  The story is similar to the tales of the break up of ordinary reality so favored by Chekhov as well as the stories of the lonely little man possessed by an inner secret life frequently developed by Sherwood Anderson.