Short Story Month: 2015--Ludwig Tieck, "Fair Eckbert"

Citing Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Goethe as the most important contributors to the novella form, Ludwig Tieck, the most significant 19th-century theorist of the novella, agrees with Goethe's notion that the story should be strange and unique and yet commonplace, as well as with Schlegel's concept that the event should be described as objectively taking place.  However, the most controversial element of Tieck's theory is his notion of a Wendepunkt, a "twist in the story" or turning point "from which it takes unexpectedly a complete different direction, and develops consequences which are nevertheless natural and entirely in keeping with character and circumstances."  It is this "extraordinary and striking turning point," says Tieck, that distinguishes the novella from other narrative forms .

Tieck's Wendepunkt is not a mere technical device; rather it is one of the results of that combination of the old allegorical romance form and the new "realistic" form initiated by Boccaccio that creates a new and unique genre. If the story begins in the world of sacred reality but reaches a point at which events seem to be accounted for in terms of psychological reality, that generic turn is what Tieck means by Wendepunkt.  If, on the other hand, the tale begins realistically and turns at some point to a form in which the laws of nature or psychology do not seem to apply, that generic turning point is also a Wendepunkt.

A failure to determine how past generic conventions are combined in a new way has resulted in critical difficulties with Ludwig Tieck's most famous novella, "Fair Eckbert".  Walter Silz says that because the tale makes use of the supernatural, it is more a "gruesome marchen" than a novella, while E. K. Bennett and John Ellis tolerate the supernatural events by calling the work a "romantic novelle" or by suggesting that, while not a marchen, it makes use of fairy tale conventions.  The problem is not only that the story makes use of such fairy-tale motifs as a magical bird, a grotesque old lady, and a child who runs away from home to enter an enchanted world, but also, as Ellis notes, that characters seem to do things without any reason, and as Bennet suggests, there does not seem to be any logical connection between the events in the tale.

The logic of Tieck's tale must be understood in two different ways, for the tale contains a tale within itself, and both inner and outer tale have their own sets of conventions.  Bertha's tale within the tale is dominated by an oneiric-logic that makes it seem predominantly like a fairy tale.  However, Bertha's story differs from fairy tales because, presented as a told story of a personal experience, it becomes a self-conscious embodiment of psychological processes. 

As Bruno Bettleheim has noted, fairy tales externalize inner processes; through the disguised means of story, they structure the unconscious anxieties and conflicts of the child's mind. However, they are not explicitly presented as such, nor are they taken to be such by their tellers or listeners; rather they are presented and received as tales of the supernatural, pure and simple.  When Bertha begins the story of her youth and tells her listener that he must not regard it as a fairy tale, no matter how strange the events, her injunction insists that the listener  regard her story as an account of a personal life and thus an illustration of inner processes, rather than as merely a fairy story.  In this way, Tieck foregrounds the thematic nature of the marchen form as revelatory of inner unconscious processes. 

That the story's subject matter is the nature of fairy tale itself as an externalization of the unconscious is made clear from the beginning of Bertha's tale.  She does not leave home for any of the reasons that we usually associate with the fairy tale departure of children, i.e., to escape an abusive step-parent or to seek her fortune in the world; rather she leaves because her childhood is torn between the two realms of reality that 19th- century short narrative frequently deals with:  the world of fantasy and the world of everyday existence.  Bertha's clumsiness, which makes her father scold her, reflects her failure to deal with the everyday world of objects and external reality because fantasies always occupy her mind. 

  Because Bertha's story is about the child's retreat from the external world into the world of fantasy or fairy tale, the specific motivation for her leaving home cannot be made clear; she leaves the house scarcely realizing what she is doing, for truly her departure is an unconscious one, both in the manifest story and in its latent meaning.  Her journey into the oneiric mountains which reveal no sign of human habitation, her encounter with the strange old woman, whose face twitches so that Bertha is never sure what she really looks like, and with the bird that lays an egg each day with a pearl or gem inside are all characterized as if they were dream--even a dream within a dream, says Bertha.  As the dream events become familiarized to her, the dream reality takes on the appearance of the only reality there is.

But even in this dream within a dream, Bertha falls further into fantasy when, as a result of her reading, she imagines a romantic vision of a beautiful knight who she longs to meet in fleshly reality.  At this point in the story, she departs from the old woman in much the same unconscious way that she left her home, as if her "intentions were already standing before her" without her being "distinctly conscious of it." Just as the conflict between fantasy and reality made her unconsciously leave home, a yearning for the reality of her fantasy makes her leave once again. 

It is inevitable, of course, in the logic of fairy tale that Bertha should return to the village from whence she came and wish to surprise her parents with her new riches.  When she finds out they are dead, she becomes self-consciously aware of the dream state as ironic wish-fulfillment, realizing, "as a result of a remarkable accident the dream of my childhood had really come true.  And now it was all in vain."  Of course, the "remarkable accident" is no accident in a similitude of the real world, nor a manifestation of poetic justice, as the Renaissance novella might have presented it, but rather the fulfillment of the story's requirements that inner desires be actualized.  At this point Bertha must give up her childhood fairy-tale world; thus she kills the magical bird she has stolen from the old woman as the last remnant of that past world.  However, because the past continues to haunt her she makes a final attempt to move into adulthood by marrying the knight Eckbert; with this gesture her story-within-the-story ends.

Now that we are back to the frame, which is Eckbert's story, we enter into a different realm of motivation and logic of events, for we are, comparatively speaking, "back to reality."  Eckbert's anxiety about the telling of the secret story to his friend, Walther, can be accounted for consciously rather than unconsciously, just as his original motivation for urging Bertha to tell the story can be accounted for as an irresistible impulse to tell a friend a secret to make him even closer a friend.  However, after the story is told, Eckbert regrets the confidence, fearing that it is human nature that the listener will misuse the secret.  This  anxiety transforms the "real" story of Eckbert in the frame into a fairy-tale-like story, as Eckbert, unconsciously, without knowing what he is doing, kills Walther and thus mysteriously "causes" the death of Bertha simultaneously.  This double loss of wife and closest friend makes Eckbert feel that his life seems "more like a strange fairy-tale than an actual mortal existence." 

The pattern of Bertha's story is repeated as Eckbert once again has an impulse to tell the story (which we assume also contains Bertha's story within it) to a new friend, Hugo; and once again he experiences the conscious anxiety that he will be betrayed.  He begins to see the face of his old friend Walther in the face of others as he unconsciously makes the same trek through a maze of rocks that Bertha made in her childhood.  When he hears the song of the bird that Bertha heard as a child, "it was all up with Eckbert's consciousness and his senses; he could not solve the mystery whether he was now dreaming or had formerly dreamt of a woman Bertha.  The most marvelous was confused with the most ordinary--the world around him bewitched--no thought, no memory was under his control."  The climax of the story comes abruptly and rapidly as the old woman appears and tells Eckbert that she is both his friend Walther and his friend Hugo, and that Bertha was his sister.  Eckbert falls to the ground, despairing, "In what terrible solitude have I spent my life."  Delirious, dazed, and confused, Eckbert dies, hearing the old woman talking, the dog barking, and the bird repeating its song.

The key to understanding the story as Eckbert's, although most of it is taken up by Bertha's insert tale, is recognizing that Tieck foregrounds the conventions of marchen as an objectification of the unconscious.  The unconscious tale is indeed Eckbert's and revolves around the problem of the self and its relationship to the "other."  Unless we understand that Eckbert "dreams" both Bertha and the framed implications of Bertha's tale, there is no way to understand how the inhabitants of Bertha's dream/tale come to occupy the world of Eckbert's dream/tale. 

The story is an objectification of Eckbert's basic human situation, for it embodies the essential loneliness of the mind itself which cannot be shared with the other.  There is no "other" in this tale, only the lonely and isolated self that is Eckbert.  Eckbert's final cry, "In what terrible solitude have I spent my life," reflects the "lonely voice" that Frank O'Connor has identified as characteristic of short fiction as a genre, for the story's combination of the conventions of projective dream/fairy tale with the conventions of subjective character consciousness is typical of the 19th-century development of short fiction.  For example, the same generic combination creates interpretative problems in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," as the marvelous and the ordinary become confused and Brown cannot tell whether he has dreamed the events in the story or whether they have actually occurred.

At the beginning of the story, Tieck leads us to believe that the frame of the tale takes place within the real world, while the story Bertha tells is marchen or dream story.  At the end of the tale, the reader realizes that the entire story is a play with "reality" as a projection of the unconscious--that Eckbert's reality is no less a story reality than Bertha's, for all is fictional reality; nothing exists outside the story, and nothing can exist inside the story except the lonely isolated self.  It is the foregrounding of this self-conscious awareness, this play with the marchen conventions and the objectifying of the unconscious as the very subject matter of "Fair Eckbert," that makes Tieck's story an advance over the marchen that precedes it and establishes it as the basis for the self-reflexive self-consciousness of short stories that follow it.  

Short Story Month: 2015--Cervantes, Exemplary Novellas

Robert Coover has said that Cervantes called his novellas "exemplary" because they represented the different writing ideas he was working on from the 1580s to 1612.  Coover claims that Cervantes' stories also "exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art by attempting to create a "synthesis between poetic analogy and literal history." Jose Ortega y Gasset provides a more developed analysis of the synthesis suggested by Cooover by pointing out how Cervantes experiments with two different kinds of narrative--fantasy stories in which the events are improbable and realistic stories in which hardly anything happens. Randall Jarrell has extended this dichotomy to stories in general by suggesting that in spite of the wide variety of narrative, there are two extremes:  "stories in which nothing happens and stories in which every thing is a happening."

However, since fantasy stories derive from the sacred tradition and thus have a highly formalized set of conventions that govern their structure and way of meaning, Ortega points out that the problem with understanding Cervantes' innovation is understanding the nature of "realism"--not the nature of the symbolism that underlies the fantasy/allegorical/sacred tradition.  Ortega says that contrary to what the "naivete of our learned researchers suppose, it is the realistic tendency that is in greater need of justification and explanation."

This is, of course, also the claim that Roman Jakobson makes in his famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing that it is insufficiently realized that the predominance of metonymy underlies and predetermines so-called realism. "Consequently," says Jakobson, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more homogeneous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation." The problem alluded to by Coover and discussed by Ortega and Jakobson is of course the crux of story that E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis have so famously exposed--the seeming impossibility of the metonymic structure of realistic prose narrative--just one damned thing after another--to serve as a signifier for anything.

Boccaccio's use of "real" characters in exemplum stories may have begun the shift from anecdote to literary fiction, but it is with Cervantes' exemplary stories that this displacement from the metaphoric or allegorical structure of the old fable toward the metonymic structure of realistic narrative marks, as suggested by Clement and Gibaldi in their study of the novella, "an end as well as a beginning in the history of short fiction," a metamorphosis of the novella into "what for want of a better term, we call `the modern short story.'"

However, as Ortega points out, the movement away from metaphor and mythos toward metonymy and realism is not made in a single leap. "The myth," says Ortega, "is always the starting point of all poetry, including the realistic, except that in the latter we accompany the myth in its descent, in its fall." Ortega argues that the collapse of the mythic is the theme of realistic poetry and that reality cannot enter into art in any other way than "by making an active and combative element out of its own inertia and desolation." The means by which Cervantes explores this tension between the poetic and the realistic has, of course, been discussed in great detail in many studies of his masterwork, Don Quixote.

  Although Don Quixote may be written in a metonymic style in which the Don seems to exist in the everyday world of reality, the theme of the novel is the secularized version of the old romance, which assumes that true reality does not exist in the everyday world but rather is transcendent. The final twist of Cervantes' great  novel is that what was previously taken to be transcendent is revealed to be hallucinatory, existing in the mind of the Don himself--a tactic that shifts the world of the sacred into the purely subjective reality of the individual. As Ortega suggests, in the Renaissance the reality of the adventure is reduced to the psychological.

Jorge Luis Borges also explains how Cervantes straddles this divide between the old transcendent world of narrative and the new immanent world of perspectival or psychological reality by avoiding the transcendent, yet smuggling it back in a new way. Borges says the "supernatural" is revealed in the reflexive nature of Don Quixote, manifested as the result of the basic assumption that reality is not absolute but rather a variety of subuniverses in which the subuniverse of everyday reality is no more real than any other. Even as Don Quixote seems a challenge to the mythic world by its metonymnic method of realism, it posits the world of the marvelous on a more basic level, the truly marvelous realization that the world of everyday reality may also be a fiction. Borges suggests that the shift that takes place in Cervantes establishes a dual mode of narrative that dominates the development of fictional forms ever since.

The paradox is that even as Cervantes' fiction becomes more metonymic, that is, more focused on the everyday world in its detailing of physical events and psychological characters--because its theme is the destruction of the mythic--it comes to be more about itself, more about the apprehension of the everyday world as a fictional construct. By parodying the old notion of the marvelous in the romance, Cervantes lays that notion bare and furthers Boccaccio's discovery of a new basis for the marvelous--one that makes aesthetic or fictional creation rather than religious and transcendent universality the only significant truth.

In Exemplary Novellas, although Cervantes adopts Boccaccio's novella pattern as the foundation for his stories, he shifts the dominant interest from plot to character and thus undermines the old poetic justice pattern and replaces it with a more ambiguous moral pattern of psychological indeterminacy. One of the best examples of this shift can be seen by comparing Boccaccio's treatment of the jealous husband theme in the three stories from the Seventh day with Cervantes' jealous husband story, "The Jealous Hidalgo." The tension between plot and character is so central to Cervantes' novella that each undermines the other and thus foregrounds Cervantes' usual theme of the conflict between reality and fantasy. 

Whereas jealousy is the fuel for plot reversals and poetic justice in Boccaccio's stories, for Cervantes jealousy is an obsession that, even as it is personally pathological--compelling its victim to imagine that which is not and forcing him to create a reality that conforms to his fantasy--it is also the psychological equivalent of what was once one of the central sources of the allegorical exemplum and what later becomes one of the driving forces of 19th-century short fiction--a mysterious, inescapable conviction with no empirical basis--what Poe called "The Imp of the Perverse."

"The Jealous Hidalgo" begins in a traditional parable fashion, with echoes of the Biblical prodigal son story. However, Cervantes cues the reader very early that he will not depend on an external parable plot, but rather on the inner life of a character, for the prodigal introduced here becomes pensive, thinking about his past, resolving to change his life. Metaphorically, plot elements in the story, such as the reality of the becalmed fleet, are backgrounded, while the psychological fact that a storm is going on inside the mind of the protagonist is foregrounded.  The potentially parable nature of the story is hinted at again when the protagonist is called "the most jealous man in the world." However, that his jealousy is psychologically obsessive rather than metaphorically allegorical is suggested when the mere thought of marriage preys on his imagination and arouses his jealousy even though he does not have a wife of which to be jealous.  As Angus Fletcher has argued, the proper analogue to allegory is obsessive-compulsive behavior.  The obsessed mind, much like a character in an allegory, seems obsessed by an idea over which it has no control. Cervantes's story marks a point at which a character who formerly would have been an allegorical function of a transcendent theme or a plot function of poetic justice becomes an obsessed character in a story or fantasy of his own making. 

No sooner does the Hidalgo say, "I do," than he is seized by the most violent jealousy, even though he has no grounds for it.  He then begins his efforts to control reality, to force it to conform to his own obsessions. In a Boccaccio story, the absurd measures the Hidalgo takes--not allowing a tailor to measure his wife but getting a stand-in for her, boarding up all the street side windows of the house, hiring a castrated Negro stableman and female slaves as servants--would all serve merely as comic causes for the inevitable reversal to be played upon him. However, the reader does not laugh when, as her parents release the young bride to her jealous husband, "it seemed to them that she was being taken to her grave."

The bride, only fourteen, still playing with dolls, is restricted to an artificial environment calculated to perpetuate her innocent childhood, in which the "entire house reeked of chastity, reserve, modesty." The husband will not even allow male animals in the house, and the stories the servants tell around the fireplace must be free of all hint of lewdness.  At this juncture of Cervantes' tale, things could go either way--toward the comic reversals of a Boccaccio story or toward the tragic inevitability of the obsessed character. However, at the point in the story when the narrator says that for all the husband's precautions it was "impossible to forestall or avoid the calamity he most feared, or, at any rate, to believe it had happened," the narrative goes both ways at once. 

For the story to veer toward the Boccaccio mode, the jealous husband must temporarily disappear to allow for plot trickery. Thus, metaphorically, the Hildago "falls asleep" as far as the narrative is concerned, while the young gallant and the typical Boccaccio themes of disguise, cleverness, and the concocting of deceptive schemes are introduced.  One of the chief devices in the Boccaccio story is the stratagem of deception, for such tactics are tacit promises that something will either turn out as projected, or, in true peripetea fashion turn out just the opposite of what is planned--which is precisely what plot means in the Boccaccio novella. 

In what might be called the Boccaccio section of the story, the narrator notes that much could be said of the way the characters dress and behave, but he abstains from telling all this, for realistic description recedes to the background while the plot/plan energy of the Boccaccio type story takes control. The central motif of pretense replacing reality is announced immediately when the narrator says that the young gallant Loaysa disguises himself so well as a lame beggar that he is a more convincing poor cripple than a real one.  Loaysa develops complex plans to counterfeit a key to the young wife's room, convinced in typical Boccaccio fashion that "an elaborate well-planned beginning will assure a good end," and convincing the servant that only cleverness, shrewdness and ingenuity will assure success.

The Boccaccio type story ends when the Hildago awakes and sees his wife in bed with Loaysa and goes to his room to get a dagger to kill them. In the Boccaccio story, such an action would trigger the successful fulfillment of wife/lover schemes and thus conclude with poetic justice for the jealous husband. However, when Cervantes' husband enters his room, he faints with grief and distress and, on awakening, sends for his wife's parents as if he were in a spell.  Instead of a comic reversal in which the husband gets what he suspects and thus deserves, the Hildago accepts responsibility in a recognition scene reminiscent of Sophoclean tragedy:  "As human diligence cannot forestall the punishment which divine will chooses to lay upon those who do not place in it all their desires and hopes, it is not to be wondered at that I was defrauded in mine, and that with my own hand I manufactured the poison which is doing away with my life."  When Carrizales admits, "I myself fabricated the house in which I shall die," he announces a short fiction convention that weaves in an out of the form's history--the concluding recognition of characters that they have been trapped in stories of their own making.

When the young wife tries to explain that she has offended her husband only in thought, not in deed, her tongue becomes numb and she faints; the story ends quickly with the Hildago's death and the wife becoming a nun. The narrator says he presents this episode as an example of how little trust can be put in keys and walls when the will is left free, concluding, "The only thing I do not know is why Leonora did not make more of an effort to excuse herself and convince the jealous husband how guiltless she had been in that whole affair. But confusion tied her tongue, and the rapidity of her husband's death gave her no opportunity to exonerate herself."

The story thus ends with the realization that thought rather than action is most telling and that whereas actions can be explained, thoughts cannot.  If the novel, exemplified by Cervantes' Don Quixote begins as a satire or parody of the romance, then the short story, exemplified by his Exemplary Novellas, begins as a tension between the demands of plot, which by its very nature is patterned and exemplary, and character, which by its very nature is unpredictable and realistic.  Just as Boccaccio made trivial what had formerly been serious, Cervantes makes serious what Boccaccio made trivial.

Rather than a simple illustration of the foolishness of a jealous husband, Cervantes' story becomes an examination of jealousy as a complex human emotion based on obsessive fantasy.  Just as the husband has tortured himself with jealousy over something that does not exist, he dies in grief over an infidelity that did not take place.  The confusion that ties the tongue of the wife is a result of the "house" that Carrizales has "fabricated."  Because of her artlessness--an artlessness he has encouraged--the young wife has no means to understand the complexities of the events that have occurred. Plotting is beyond her.  

Moreover, the end of the story focuses on the problem of how she has offended her husband not in action but only in thought--a problem that exceeds her ability to explain it.  The ultimate implication of the story--that thought is as powerful as action and the psychological as powerful as the physical--is the central theme that so fascinates Goethe, Tieck, Hoffmann, and the other German Romantics, who, in the early 19th century take the next important step in the development of short fiction.

National Short Story Month--2015

My Horoscope (Aquarius)  in the Los Angeles Times today (April 30, 2015) reads as follows:

"Seize a chance to get in front of people to talk about what you're selling.  Whether it's a product, relationship, or idea, you'll be persuasive."

Although I no longer "get in front of people," as I once did in the classroom, and although I am more than a little reluctant to use the word "selling" in regard to my ideas about the short story, I have to admit that I have always hoped to be "persuasive" about the virtues of that underrated literary form. And I have always fancied myself a "seize the day" kind of guy.  So!

Tomorrow is the first day of Short Story Month, an informal recognition that began in 2007 by Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers' Network and which still exists informally--made up of a loose congregation of bloggers, writers, and critics with no official, i.e. financial, support,  such as the Academy of American Poets' support of  National Poetry Month in April since 1996.

If you google Short Story Month 2015, you will find a few publishers, such as Atticus Books, Vintage,  and Graywolf,  recognizing May as the month of the short story, and you will see that a few sites have set up plans to  publish or invite stories for the next thirty-one days.

For several years I have been working on a magnum opus of sorts—a critical history of the form, analyzing the thematic and technical characteristics of those stories that serve as milestones in the genre's development.

This year, in honor of Short Story Month, I plan to post  thirty-one brief discussions (one-a-day, if my energy holds out) of those stories that mark important points of the short story's development. I hope to explain why they are important.

I begin tomorrow by looking at the famous "Falcon" story from Boccaccio's Decameron.

Apologies and Promises

In the seven years I have been writing these blog posts, this month (April, 2015) is the first month I have failed to post an essay or commentary. I apologize to my readers and can only plead that my reasons are personal responsibilities to my family.

During this month, I planned several projects in response to comments and requests from some of my readers, for which I have done considerable reading, but have not had the time for concentrated thought and writing. The projects I have postponed, but which I still hope to get to, are as follows:

.    

            The stories of Scottish writer James Kelman, in response to suggestions from Brian Hamill, submissions editor for an interesting journal of New Fiction called Thi Wurd.

2.      The stories of British writer V. S. Pritchett, especially the stories in a new paperback of entitled On the Edge of the Cliff, sent to me by James Doyle of Turnpike Books.

3.      African Stories in a 2012 collection edited by Barbara  Solomon and W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. entitled An African Quilt.

4.      The Stories of Donald Antrim in his collection The Emerald Light in the Air, recommended by Jason Makansi.

But I fear I must postpone writing on these projects for still another month.  During the month of May, I plan to post a series of short essays on 31 stories (one for each day of Short Story Month) that are important in the development of the short story as a genre, beginning with Boccaccio in the Renaissance and extending at least through the so-called Renaissance of the Short Story near the end of the Twentieth Century. These pieces are part of a large "work-in-progress" on the history of the short story, on which I have been working for several years.

Three from Ireland: Boylan, Donovan, and MacLaverty

I have long had a special fondness for Ireland.  My wife's mother was born in Belfast and met a young Yankee stationed there during WWII and said yes when he asked her to marry him and come live in California. My wife, although born in Los Angeles, is thus an Irish citizen and has a soft Irish accent that, among many other beauteous features of mood and mien made me fall in love with her over thirty-five years ago.  

In 1996 and 97, I was fortunate enough to get a senior Fellowship at University College, Dublin, teaching the short story, which has always been a special talent for the Irish. I was also asked to teach a class on the American short story at Trinity.  We lived near Blackrock just to the south of Dublin, close to University College, Dublin, to which I could walk. Once a week, I took the Dublin Area Rapid Transit into the city to Trinity to teach at that iconic campus. 

I loved that year in Dublin—loved the city, loved the people, loved the Guiness.  I enjoyed going to the historic Abbey Theatre to see Irish plays. And I loved taking the bus with my wife and daughter to Belfast to visit relatives. I love both the North and the South and hope the current peaceful co-existence between them continues.

After my retirement, I arranged to teach a three-week summer class in Dublin on James Joyce. I took twenty American students to the city, and we walked the walk of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and we read all the stories in the Dubliners and we read Ulysses.  I did this twice, once with my daughter attending, which was a joy, and once, when I contracted a terrible lung disease that almost killed me. I remember the chilling simple comment of one of my student evaluations: "I think he is dying."  I haven't been back since, sad to say, but I hope to return, bearing no hard feelings.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my take on three Irish short-story writers—one from Dublin, one from Galway, and one from Belfast.

Clare Boylan

            If you come to Clare Boylan’s stories looking for gritty realism about dirty old Dublin or folklore spun by a traditional storyteller, then be prepared to change your expectations about Irish fiction.  The booming Irish economy, called the Celtic Tiger by other members of the European Union, although short-lived, changed the cultural landscape of the old country.

Except for one character calling a man a “shifty wee shite” or another skeptically inquiring, “are you coddin,” Boylan’s stories bear few tale-tell cultural markers; most could have taken place in any mid-sized western city or the suburbs thereof.

And, the only traditional oral tale is “Concerning Virgins,” a fascinating yarn about a terrible old man named Narcissus Fitzgerald living with two daughters, who advertises for a virgin with whom to have a son and gets a predictably surprising, poetically just, response.

Boylan collects thirty-eight stories in her Collected Stories (2002) from her previous three short story collections published originally between 1983 and 1995, ranging from her first, “Appearances,” in which a young girl is ominously enticed into a secluded area by a man promising to show her a special secret (which turns out to be his prized collection of religious medals) to the title story of her last collection “That Bad Woman,” in which a married woman facing menopause merrily has an affair with a shocked and reluctant lover.

            Granted, some of these stories are just clever bits of ironic reversal, for example “My Son the Hero” in which a mother who suspects her son of murder discovers that he was telling the truth when he said he got scratched saving a cat from a tree, or “The Stolen Child,” in which a childless woman steals a baby, tries to abandon it, saves it from drowning, and finally discovers that the mother was glad to get rid of it for a while. 

            Don’t look for political or economic criticism here; the closest candidate is “Thatcher’s Britain,” a phrase which makes a character think of England as a pleasant place with thatched houses, fields of hay, and employment for all, only to discover that many Irish there live in derelict houses. 

Don’t look for easy satires about the Catholic Church either, except in the story “Confession,” which deals lightly with lying to the priest about sex. 

            Boylan’s best stories are those which deal perceptively with the secret life of women, regardless of what society they live in. “A Nail on the Head” is a sad story about a woman whose husband brings strangers home to dinner.  In “A Particular Calling,” a traveling electrolysis lady who visits various towns advertising “the usual service” is coarsely misunderstood by five drunken farmers.  And “The Little Madonna” sensitively links a woman facing menopause with a sixteen-year old mother. 

            Clare Boylan is a sophisticated, witty writer who can spear the cocky and the condescending with biting barbs.   She knows men well enough to make them uncomfortable, and women well enough to bring them shocks of recognition.   She is too good a writer to remain one of Ireland’s best-kept cultural secrets.

Gerard Donovan

Ireland’s past is marked by quixotic revolts and ignominious failures.  In 1848, during the Potato Famine, a small band of idealistic poets known as the Young Irelanders tried to convince starving farmers to rebel against the British.  The uprising petered out in a garden, and is still known as “the siege of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch.” However, since 1973, when Ireland joined the European Union, a booming economy and a youthful population has given the country its greatest success story.

Gerard Donovan, who grew up in Galway, is well aware of the social and cultural effects of this success.  The characters in his book Young Irelanders (2009), far from poetic rebels, are more like John Cheever’s prosaic American suburbanites. “Archeologists” juxtaposes the new Ireland of shopping centers and housing tracts with the old Ireland that lies just beneath the surface. A couple hired by a company to look for artifacts before development discover the bones of a female child—a young Irelander—and find their own relationship torn between old and new expectations.

            Several stories deal with couples whose marriages are threatened by changing values in a country where people no longer fear the wrath of the village priest. In “Morning Swimmers,” three middle-aged men go for morning swims in Galway Bay.  On this particular morning one overhears the other two talking about an affair his wife is having.  In typical Cheever fashion in “How Long Until,” a man asks his wife how long she would wait after his death before she slept with someone else.  As the story cranks up to a crisis, the man lamely says, “It was just a question.” Many of the stories unearth secrets between husbands and wives.  When in “Shoplifting in the USA” a man who works for an American storeowner tells his wife that his employer is obsessed with catching thieves, she confesses that she has been a thief all her life.

             In “Another Life,” a woman discovers after her husband’s death that he owns a home in another town, in which he has been supporting a woman who has had his child. The most Cheever-like story, with echoes of “The Swimmer,” is “Country of the Grand,” in which a man makes a tortured symbolic journey though his past. “Harry Dietz” is a similar hallucinatory story in which an Irish man living in the United States takes a drive to Chicago in his pajamas because he has lately “run out of life,” and the “emptiness is pouring into his head.” Although new to Ireland, the subject of these stories will seem familiar to American readers who know the work of Updike and Cheever. 

Bernard MacLaverty

The first story in Bernard MacLaverty’s collection Matters of Life and Death (2006) is an emblematic introit that he says he hopes encapsulates many of the horrors of Northern Ireland since Bloody Friday.  Metaphorically titled “On the Roundabout,” to suggest the never-ending dizzyingly circularity of sectarian violence in the North, the story takes place soon after the beginnings of the so-called Troubles in the early seventies.  A man driving into a traffic circle with what he calls his Norman Rockwell family rescues a young man being savagely beaten by two laughing assailants.  That’s all that happens, but in its restrained elegance, the story epitomizes the deep-seated hatred that has crippled the country for years.

Three additional stories derive either directly or indirectly from the Troubles. In “A Trusted Neighbor,” a Protestant policeman seems like a friend to his Catholic neighbor, until, with something of a shock at the end, we learn that he is setting him up for a vicious attack. “The Trojan Sofa” is a comic tour-de-force told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old boy whose Catholic father sews him up in a sofa, which he then sells to a British Major.  Once the boy is in the house, he is to let his father in to loot it--a robbery his father justifies by saying that the wrong done to Ireland by the British is so great that anything done to them in retaliation is honorable.

“Learning to Dance” is a sad and subtle sonata about two young boys who are placed in the temporary care of a childless doctor and his wife when their father, a prominent man, is killed in what we assume was an act of sectarian violence.  As usual in a MacLaverty story, nothing much happens, but the story is a moving elegiac evocation of loss, sadness, and perplexity.

Like many others, MacLaverty learned to write this kind of subtle atmospheric story from Chekhov—a mentor to whom he pays tribute in “The Clinic,” in which a man passes the time in a doctor’s office while anxiously waiting to hear if he has diabetes by reading a Chekhov story entitled “The Beauties.”  The man’s experience with his fear and his experience with the story merge in the end when love and beauty are reaffirmed as both the man in Chekhov’s story and the man in MacLaverty’s story feel the “wind blow across [their] soul.”

 In  “Visiting Takabuti,” another Chekhovian story, a maiden aunt takes her two nephews to see a famous female mummy in a Belfast museum.  On the bus ride home, she thinks about a traditional Irish tale in which, at the moment of death, the soul tiptoes to the door but then turns back and kisses the body that has sheltered it all these years.  Although the story’s ending may seem a bit too symbolically pat and predictable, MacLaverty creates the woman so delicately that the reader cannot help but be moved. 

The longest story in the collection, “Up the Coast,” moves back and forth between the point of view of a young woman who has gone to a remote area to paint and a young man who hunts her down and rapes her.  MacLaverty refuses to sensationalize or politicize the act, choosing instead to focus on the understated artistic means by which the woman transcends the violation. Although Bernard MacLaverty is probably best known to Americans because of the film versions of two of his novels, Cal and Lamb, he is a very fine short-story writer in a tradition of Irish masters of the form from James Joyce to Frank O’Connor to William Trevor.

Mystery in the Short Story

Back when I first started teaching, I was twenty-five years old, just out of graduate school.  Hell, 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 we all 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?"

Many writers have talked about this basic mystery.  One of my favorites is Flannery O'Connor, who once explained it (without really explaining it) much more succinctly than I did to my impatient student.  "The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it.  A story," O'Connor says, "is a way to say something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.  You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate."

Well, yes, sure, that's right.  But what kinds of meanings cannot be expressed in a statement? Are there really such things? Later on, O'Connor says, "There are two qualities that make fiction.  One is the sense of mystery, and the other is the sense of manners.  You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you."  Yeah, O.K. I get that.  But where do you get the mystery?  She doesn't' answer that one.

"Mystery" is indeed Flannery O'Connor's favorite word.  She says that for the writer who believes that life is essentially mysterious, "what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself."  For this kind of writer, the "meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology ... have been exhausted.  Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do."

I love it when she talks like that.  One more:  "The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible....His problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him."  Yes, I believe it.  Somehow the concrete doesn't stay concrete in the short story, but like the mystery of incarnation, is transformed into spirit even as it remains body. But, Lord, what do you make of that?  The "mystery of existence", O'Connor says confidently.  Yes, I believe that.  I just don't know how stories get at it in a way that nothing else quite can.

Most of my favorite writers talk like this.  Eudora Welty is another.  She 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."

"The mystery of allurement."  Yes, I believe that.  And yes, when it comes to the stories I like best, the more I read them, the more mysterious they become.  I love being caught in the beautiful mystery of them. 

Umberto Eco uses a metaphor to describe what is required of us from such stories in his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods:  “There are two ways of walking through a wood," Eco says.  “The first is to try one or several routes (so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible, say, or to reach the house of grandmother, Tom Thumb, or Hansel and Gretel); the second is to walk so as to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible and others are not.  Similarly, there are two ways of going through a narrative text. 

Any such text is addressed, above all, to a model reader of the first level, who wants to know quite rightly how the story ends (whether Ahab will manage to capture the whale, or whether Leopold Bloom will meet Stephen Daedalus after coming across him a few times on the sixteenth of June 1904).  But every text is addressed to a model reader of the second level, who wonders what sort of reader that story would like him or her to become and who wants to discover precisely how the model author goes about serving as a guide for the reader. In order to know how a story ends, it is usually enough to read it once.”  However, in contrast, says Eco, “to become the model reader of the second level the text has to be read many times, and certain stories endlessly."

Well, if the short story does not hold together by plot or action, but rather by reiteration through pattern, then the short story is not a narrative form at all, is it?  For what the short story wishes to explore is not to be discovered by narrative--that is, is not to be discovered by recounting events organized by cause and effect in time. 

The implication of this--an issue I have often referred to--is that the short story 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, something that cannot be understood as a time-bound, socially-specific event.  Moreover, the issue of cause and effect is crucial, for the short story seems more apt to deal with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible logical, sociological, or psychological cause.  

And such an event without a clear cause is hard to sustain over the length of the novel, that is, unless the novel itself becomes circular, mythic, patterned, rather than linear, such as, of course, Moby Dick. If the book had focused only on the plot of Ahab's pursuit of the whale, it would have been much shorter than it is.  Moby Dick is more like a short story than a novel because it is an exercise in accounting for what cannot be accounted for in any practical, logical, sociological, psychological way.  And so, of course, is Ulysses.  Both books are like short stories.  They just happen to be long.

When Frank Kermode in his Norton lectures twenty years ago asked, "Why Are Narratives Obscure?"  he cited Kafka's parable  "Before the Law" in The Trial. It’s about a man who comes to beg admission to the Law but is kept out by a doorkeeper.  So he sits there year after year in inconclusive conversation with the doorkeeper outside the door unable to get in.  When he is old and near death, he sees an immortal radiance streaming from the door.  He asks the doorkeeper why he alone has come to this door and receives this reply: "This door was intended only for you.  Now I am going to shut it." 

A terrible parable, you would have to agree.  "To perceive the radiance of the shrine," says Kermode, "is not to gain access to it; the Law, or the Kingdom to those within, such as the doorkeeper, may be powerful and beautiful, but to those outside they are absolutely inexplicable.  This is a mystery."  "While the insiders protect the Law without understanding it, the outsiders like us see an uninterpretable radiance and die."  A terrible parable indeed.

Kermode is concerned, of course, with the radiant obscurity of parables, a word which in the Gospel of Mark is used as a synonym for "mystery."  It is the radiance Welty refers to when she 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."

To Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz, to outsiders to the mystery, 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."

David Means' "Assorted Fire Events" and Ron Carlson's "At the Jim Bridger": A Reading

In the past seven years that I have been writing this blog, I have discussed what I consider to be the distinctive generic characteristics of the short story form, have tried to evaluate new short story collections published during that period, and  have commented on the status of the short story in the general and the academic reading public.

However, what I always enjoyed most when I was teaching short fiction was attempting a "close reading" of an individual short story and then trying to encourage my students to enter into a dialogue with me about my reading vs. their reading. I miss that dynamic engagement with students and lament the fact that I cannot replicate it on this blog.

At least I can share my "reading" of some stories that I admire in hopes that my readers might admire them too, and maybe even enter into a dialogue with me about them. Here are my thoughts on two such stories:

David Means, "Assorted Fire Events"

“Assorted Fire Events,” the title story of David Means’ second book of short stories, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, is a poetic meditation on the universal fascination with fire, describing and pondering the significance of several events in an attempt to explore what drives people to “play with fire” or “follow the fire truck” to a burning building.

The first event does not focus on the person who started the fire, but with the boy’s fascination with the effect of fire on a house.  What he likes is the way the fire makes its way from the inside out until there is no more inside, only outside.  He also likes the way the pine trees around the cottage are reduced to brittle towers.  The skeletal remains after fire has ravaged a house and its surroundings create a poetic image of something being stripped to the bone.

The narrator introduces the second fire event by saying that the sound of fire, like popcorn in hot oil just before the kernels explode, makes him laugh.  He tries to find a metaphor for the sound, noting it was like a “huge hunk of brittle cellophane crumpled by the hand of God.”  However, he says he will never use that metaphor, but rather the metaphor of a giant weed whacker. The ironic juxtaposition of this sound against the sound of his children whooping and hollering with joy is what interests him in this event.  When he finds out that the fire started from spontaneous combustion from varnish-soaked brushes, he creates an additional metaphor of sound in which the brushes sitting in the hot sun begin to sizzle and talk to each other, until “drunk with the elixir” of the varnish, they are ready to “burst forth in the song of fire.”

The next two events focus on the burning of living flesh, first by a boy named Shank who burns a dog and then by his aunt who burns herself alive.  The previous metaphor of the singing fire is extended to a metaphor of dance; the dog’s body writhes in a heat wave and no one is sure if the movement is the dog’s or that of heat distortion; it is like the monks “doing their sit-down self-immolating dances during Nam.” The narrator muses that the plot of fire is both wildly fanatic and calm at the same time, taking its own sweet time and then becoming logarithmic, until it “sings sweetly the fantastic house-burning lament.”

The final and most extended fire event combines the horror and beauty of fire.  When a young boy named Fenton tries to launch his homemade rocket ship with gasoline, the fire quickly gets out of control and engulfs him.  The ironic juxtaposition of horrible destruction and comic effect is then suggested by a description of Fenton on fire, looking like an actor in a fire suit, a stunt person like a Chaplin tramp.  This image of opposites is echoed at the end when the boy is so scarred that people try not to look at him for fear of laughing out loud.  The narrator says he looks like a clown whose goofy smile is painted over the face of the saddest-looking, most pathetic clown-school dropout.

Ultimately, the narrator sees Fenton as like Christ who has walked into the fires of hell to suffer for all humankind.  Thus, the fire is a holy event, for the boy has experienced that extreme mystery that he cannot explain and that the writer can only create assorted fire events to try to capture.

“Assorted Fire Events"  is an example of a writer’s attempt to use language to explore the basic paradoxical mystery of fire as a powerful force that can burn away the extraneous and reduce one to pure essentials.  David Means’ method for achieving this exploration is to reject linear narrative altogether and describe various fire events in such a way that even as they are horrifying they are somehow eerily beautiful.  If one is concerned with images rather than physical actuality, what is horrible becomes abstractly beautiful.  If one focuses only on the sound of the fire, it is “lively and spunky” like popcorn.  Consequently, although there is nothing particularly funny about fire, if one divorces the sound of it from the destructive power of it, it is comic.  And if one perceives the immolation of a dog or indeed a human being as being like a dance, then that too, divorced from its physical horror, can be beautiful.

In this way, the narrator moves from one fire event to another, describing them as purely aesthetic objects. The aunt’s first-person note written from the point of view of the gas can serves as a grotesque parallel to the aunt’s body and mind; the narrator thinks of the meaninglessness of the can’s life, as it is used for mundane tasks, all the while the vapors inside it pushing against the roof of its mouth, “singing, making little arias to the instability of their bonds.”

The final event of the burning of the young boy, as terrifying as it may be in actuality, is transformed into an emblem of paradox, like that of the mythic transformation of Christ from mere body into spirit.  Although it seems cruel to laugh at the scarred face of the boy, what one is really laughing at is the mystery of the sadness that underlies the painted smile.  Thus, the basic technique of the story is to use the essential methods of poetry, which, like fire itself, transforms the merely physical into the aesthetically meaningful and beautiful.

Ron Carlson, "At The Jim Bridger"

Although he has published two novels, Ron Carlson is one of those rare writers who has remained true to the literary form he seems to love best and at which he excels—the much-maligned short story. “At the Jim Bridger” is the title story of his fourth collection.

Echoing many short-story writers before him, Carlson considers each story he writes an investigation and a surprise.  For example, he has said that when the woman in the story tells Rusty he has heard the wonderful story about him he was surprised, for he did not know that he was writing a story about stories. And in many ways, the nature of story is one of the predominant themes of “At the Jim Bridger.”  The story Donner tells the woman who is not his wife about being caught in a snowstorm and saving Rusty by keeping him warm, is what began their affair.  And the story that Rusty tells Donner about losing his girl to his boss is a story that bonds them in the sleeping bag in the snow. 

The woman’s love for Donner results in part from the story he tells her.  However, when he sees Rusty’s pickup in the parking lot, he senses something false in his relationship with the woman, something not as genuine as the night in the sleeping bag with Rusty.  That the erotic experience with Rusty seems more real than his sexual experience with the woman does not suggest that Donner has homosexual longings. His lying down flesh to flesh with Rusty is a life or death experience, and the erotic nature of the encounter is not narrowly sexual, but rather broadly mythically. 

Whereas Donner told the woman the story to seduce her, he now feels that this use of the story has cheapened it.  At the end of the story, as Rusty and the woman dance in the New Year and he goes outside and watches the magnificent moose across the lake, he thinks that to use the story as he had, “to show it to her, burn it like a match, had led to this new darkness and the longer night.”

It would be easy to oversimplify Donner’s encounter with Rusty either by reducing it to the perhaps meaningless term of latent homosexuality or by putting it in the category of masculine bonding typical of locker room banter and towel-slapping.  However, Carlson risks this, and by his no-nonsense style and the very seriousness with which the describes the encounter, succeeds in suggesting that an erotic experience can occur between two men that is not narrowly sexual, but rather can lead to a profound realization of what it means to hold someone else as if it meant life or death.  “At the Jim Bridger” suggests that genuine stories about such bonding encounters, regardless of the gender of those engaged in them, are all we have to protect us from the cold that surrounds us.

Ron Carlson says that the title story of At the Jim Bridger is his tribute to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  However, its tight-lipped style, its focus on doing things with care, and its emphasis on telling a story well makes it a more likely descendent of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.”  Donner is a Hemingway character who does everything with care, with a kind of exactness that borders on ritual.  He tells the story of his encounter with Rusty with the same kind of precision that he uses in the wilderness to build a fire.  When he tells the story well, “something in him knitted up taut and he felt centered and ready.”  This sense of exactitude, of getting it just right, is part of the Hemingway style that dominates the story.  Moreover, there is here the same sense of the significance of being “alone in real places,” often suggested by Hemingway.  The tight-lipped style in which the story is told reflects the masculine bonding theme that holds it together. 

 The Hemingway style can most clearly be seen in Carlson’s description of the physical encounter between Rusty and Donner in the sleeping bag.  After Donner takes Rusty’s hands and puts them in his own groin to give them warmth, “he felt himself stirred, a reflex he gave in to.”  Donner identifies Rusty with his son and wants to rescue him with his own body, for as he talks to Rusty he also talks to his son. As Rusty falls asleep in Donner’s arms, “Donner knew that Rusty had taken him into his hands and they were together that way in the mountain tent.”

The story that Rusty tells Donner makes him sick, for he imagines the boyish Rusty being betrayed by his boss, an older man he saw as a father figure.  The seemingly irrelevant story of Donner’s son running away is actually a reflection of Donner’s seeing Rusty as a son who has been betrayed by a father and who now can be rescued by another father.  These parallels, like the parallel of the two fishing trips, create a balanced structure of significance for the story.