The short story's dependence on tightly unified form
rather than mimetic methods has been its central aesthetic characteristic since
Poe’s assertion: 'In the whole composition there should be no word written, of
which the tendency . . . is not to the pre-established design.'" One of the reasons the short story has
always been less respected by critics than the novel is the often tacit,
sometimes explicit, suspicion that there is something psychologically or
aesthetically "unhealthy" about the form, that it is
"obsessed" with an abnormally artificial and intense unity that has a
tendency to dissolve the referential material of the form.
The short story's dependence on form, however, is
not simply a product of Edgar Allan Poe's obsessive imagination; it is a
conventional characteristic deriving from the short story's ancestry in myth
and folklore. As Frederic Jameson
reminded us in The Prison House of Language, short stories have a kind
of "atemporal and object-like unity in the way they convert existence into
a sudden coincidence between two systems:
a resolution of multiplicity into unity, or a fulfillment of a single
wish." Jameson says that for Poe
the short story was a way of "surmounting time, of translating a formless
temporal succession into a simultaneity which we can grasp and possess."
Poe has always been accused of
being indifferent to living, flesh and blood subjects. W. H. Auden has said there is no place in
any of his stories for "the human individual as he actually exists in
space and time," that is, as a natural creature and an historical
person. Richard Wilbur in his famous
Library of Congress Lecture in 1959 concluded that Poe's aesthetic that
"art should repudiate everything human and earthly," was insane. However, the repudiation of
"reality" as defined only as everyday human experience is precisely
what myth and folklore--the primal forerunners of the short story--are based
on.
As Mircea Eliade has shown, when
primitive human beings divided the world into the two realms of the profane
(the world of everyday reality) and the sacred (the world of desire for
immanent or transcendent meaning), they had no doubt that true reality lay
within the realm of the sacred. Poe's
aesthetic, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the short story, has always been
based on this same assumption that the artistic objectification of desire, not
the stuff of everyday, is true reality.
Although Poe's immediate background
for this perspective lay in the gothic romance popular in Germany and England,
the late 18th- and early 19th-century romance with which Poe was familiar
differed from its medieval prototype by being a hybrid form that combined the
symbolic projective characters of the old romance with the increasingly
realistic detail and social reality of the novel.
The ambiguity and complexity of
such early prototypes of the short story as "Young Goodman Brown,
"The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Bartleby, the
Scrivener" result from the fact that in these stories allegorical
characters in a code-bound plot uneasily interrelate with realistic characters
in the verisimilitude of a real world.
The sense we have that something "unnatural" motivates Goodman
Brown, Roderick Usher, and Bartleby results from the fact that they are
allegorical figures who have stepped into an "as-if-real" world
created by the techniques of verisimilitude.
Angus Fletcher provides a
suggestion about the effect created by such juxtaposition in his discussion of
allegory. He argues that because the
allegorical figure is bound to its single role in the story in which it plays a
part, if placed in the real world, the character would act like an obsessed
person. For example, a character named
"Faith" in an allegory would act as if she were obsessed with faith,
since she would be an embodiment of that characteristic and thus could not
"think" of anything else. And
indeed, the characters in short fiction often seem motivated by something that
they cannot articulate and that those around them cannot easily understand.
The most obvious early examples are
those stories by Poe that focus on "the perverse," that
obsessive-like behavior that compels someone to act in a way that may go
against reason, common sense, even the best interests of the survival of the
physical self. In many of Poe's most
important stories, the obsession is presented as behavior that can only be
manifested in elliptical or symbolic ways.
Two of Hawthorne's best-known
stories--"Wakefield" and "Young Goodman Brown"--also
manifest this same mysterious sense of obsessive acts that have no obvious,
commonsense motivation. Goodman Brown
alternately acts as if he were an allegorical figure who must make his journey
into the forest as an inevitable working out of the preordained mythic story of
which he is a part, and as a psychologically complex, realistic character who,
although obsessed with his journey, is able to question its wisdom and
morality. In "Wakefield" Hawthorne
is not interested in a man who is realistically motivated to leave his wife
because he no longer cares for her, but rather a character who gets so
entangled in an obsessive act that he can neither explain it nor escape it.
Melville's Bartleby cannot explain
why he is compelled to behave as he does either. He responds to the wall outside his window as if it were not
merely a metaphor for the absurdity that confronts him, but rather the
absurdity itself and thus, like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he
responds to the map as if it were the territory, kicks himself loose from the
earth, and becomes transformed into a character who no longer can be defined
within social, historical, or cultural contexts. As a result, the reader is caught in an ambivalent situation of
not knowing whether to respond to Bartleby as if he is a character who is
psychologically obsessed or an allegorical emblem of obsession. It is typical of the short story that when
an obsessed character makes the metaphoric mistake of perceiving a metaphor as
real, he or she becomes transformed into a parabolic figure in a fable of his
own her own creation.
What is it about the short story
that demands this focus on unified form, and what does "obsession"
have to do with it? A brief summary of
some of the characteristics of psychological obsession may point to some
answers. Freud says, and most analysts
confirm, that obsessive acts are usually performed to escape feelings of dread
or anxiety--most often defined as a vague fear of loss of identity. Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety
says that Franklin D. Roosevelt's line about "fear of fear itself" is
what he means by anxiety, since anxiety results from no discernible cause. As Roderick Usher says about his struggle
with the grim fantasy FEAR, he has no abhorrence of danger, "except in its
absolute effect--in terror."
Analysts suggest that since anxiety cannot be dealt with directly
because its sources are usually unknown, the individual develops defenses
against it, of which the obsessive defense is the most common.
Ritual is one of the most
characteristic obsessive means by which one defends against anxiety, for the
ritual act is a symbolic enactment to simulate command of that for which the
personality feels it has no control.
Freud's famous "fort-da, described" in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, in which a baby repetitively throws a toy out of its crib
to simulate its sense of control over the mother's departure is perhaps the
most famous example. If, as Georg
Lukács has said, the short story is the most artistic form, it may be because,
as Frederic Jameson has suggested, it is the most formal and ritualistic
narrative form, for it recapitulates the most basic motivation of the artistic
impulse--the "for-da"--the need to create a similitude of control.
Randal Jarrell describes the same
compulsion when he claims that our stories show that we take pleasure in
"repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found
unbearable: the child whose mother left
her so often that she invented a game of throwing her doll out of her crib,
exclaiming as it vanished 'Gone! gone!' was a true poet." Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that fairy
stories, one of the primary progenitors of the short story, are such ritualized
defenses or outlets for childhood anxiety.
Bettleheim argues that the child is subject to fears of loneliness,
isolation, and mortal anxiety--existential anxieties that fairy tales take
seriously and deal with by objectifying in a highly formal structure, much the
way that Sufi healing stories do.
As psychologist Leon Salzman
reminds us, the obsessive impulse is not a defense against anxiety about
everyday problems, but rather anxiety about the most basic problems that arise
from our fundamental humanness. Salzman
says that realization of one's "humanness--with its inherent
limitations--is often the basis for considerable anxiety and obsessive attempts
at great control over one's living."
Freud noted that obsessed neurotics turn their thoughts "to those
subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and
judgments remain open to doubt. The
chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death,
and memory....”
The entire line of development of
the short story--from fairy tale to Poe, from Chekhov to Raymond Carver--has focused
on such basic human anxieties and has dealt with them by the creation of a
highly formalized, unified, and ritualized aesthetic object. As a result the short story has often been
accused of being cut off from everyday social reality and thus somehow
unhealthy.
However, this severance from social reality is simply part of the
short story's generic heritage. In the
early 19th century, Friedrich Schlegel argued that the short narrative form is
like a story "torn away from any cultural background"--a perception
echoed by Frank O'Connor's famous claim that the short story focuses on
characters that remain remote from the community--"romantic,
individualistic, and intransigent."
Richard Ford has said that short
stories in particular do not have a clear relationship to the national
character because they are often about things that are not clear but need
clearing up: "Making short stories
into exponents for history certainly isn't the most interesting thing we can do
with them....” Interesting or not, when critics are unable to find any
semblance of social reality in fiction, they are apt to accuse the form of
being "inhuman" and "unnatural." When they encounter fiction that depends on poetic techniques of
compression and highly unified form rather than mimetic techniques of expansion
and verisimilitude, they are apt to call it "obsessive" and
"mechanical."
Perhaps there is something about
the essential nature of storytelling that naturally moves toward compression
and form as opposed to expansion and explanation. Walter Benjamin seems to think so in his well-known discussion of
Nikolai Leskov, for he notes that one of the main reasons for the decline in
storytelling is the increase in the dissemination of information:
"Actually it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from
explanation as one reproduces it . . ..
The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the
greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced
upon the reader. It is left up to him
to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative
achieves an amplitude that information lacks."
If Benjamin is right, then the
common critical accusation that the short story is somehow unnatural and
obsessed is merely the result of a common bias toward novelistic information
and away from the pure storytelling of the short story.
