Short Story Month: 2015—Lamb's "Dream Children" and Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale

The gothic writers and the English romantic poets of the early part of the nineteenth century shifted away from a concept of language as referential and the art work as imitative to a view of language as constitutive and the art work as creative.  The Romantics demythologized the old tales and ballads, divesting them of their external values, and then remythologized them by internalizing those values and self-consciously projecting them outwards.  They wished to preserve the old religious values of the romance and ballad form without the religious dogma and mythological trappings that formerly attended them; knowing that the origin of the old story mode lay in basic psychic processes, they secularized the myth by radically foregrounding the subjective and projective nature of story, thus returning to the psychological origins of myth as the primal source of story.

The ballad, which had previously existed seemingly in vacuo as received story without the influence of the teller, became infused with the subjectivity of the speaker and projected onto the world as a new mythus.  Value existed in the world outside, but only because it existed first within the imagination of the artist.  The romantic artists' fascination with medievalism and folk material springs from their realization of the basic religious or spiritual source of both the old romance and the folk ballad.  Their fascination with the old ballads were part of their efforts to recapture the primal religious experience, albeit in a new way.The positioning of a real speaker in a concrete situation encountering a particular phenomenon that his own subjectivity transforms from the profane into a psychological similitude of the sacred, but about which he is always undecided, is an important impetus to the development of the early nineteenth-century short story.

 Whereas Coleridge's task in The Lyrical Ballads was to focus on the supernatural, "yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to choose subjects from ordinary life and "excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us."  

Clear examples of this dual project are Coleridge's lyrical story, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's story lyric, "Resolution and Independence."  In the Lyrical Ballads the "story" element, the hard outlines of the event, are subsumed by the lyrical element, which is foregrounded.  However, in America, for Hawthorne and Poe, the story element is foregrounded; the lyrical element remains primarily as the personal voice of the teller.  As George Lukacs says, in the short story, when the writer lifts a fragment out of the totality of life, "this selection, this delimitation, puts the stamp of its origin in the subject's will and knowledge upon the work itself: it is, more or less, lyrical in nature."

Consequently, while America is usually given the credit for the origin of the short story, it is clear that the basic impulse for the form began in Germany with the romantic novella and in England with the eighteenth-century essayists and the nineteenth-century poets.  Two well-known and frequently-cited short narratives from the early nineteenth century in England make use of the same devices and conventions that underlie the more accepted beginnings of the form in America, Germany, France, and Russia. These include Charles Lamb's "Dream Children," because of its focus on the tension between reality and imagination and Sir Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale," because of the relationship between its narrator and the traditional ballad story.

 T. O Beachcroft suggests that "Dream Children" (1822), Charles Lamb's most famous essay, with its narrative movement and its management of time between present and past, is a central example of the emergence of the short story from the essay.  Indeed, the piece is a precursor to a central nineteenth-century short story convention, for it depends on a surprise ending in which what the reader took to be an event is revealed to be reverie.

On a first reading of "Dream Children," one has no reason to doubt the actuality of the event described--that of the narrator's children sitting around him to hear about their great grandmother and their uncle--until at the very end when the narrator awakes and finds himself alone.  The imagined events, because they correspond to the projected reactions of the reverie-children to the made-up memory, convince us of their reality until we discover that the teller is an old bachelor and that the children are only those who might have been.

As in the 18th-century essay form generally, no one really exists in "Dream Children" except the teller; characters and events merely serve his rhetorical purpose.  The structure consists of long passages of reverie parading as discursive recollection, beginning with the phrase, "Then I told them how...", alternating  with short descriptions of the children's reactions, beginning with such phrases as, "Here Alice put on one of her dear mother's looks," "Here John smiled, as much as to say...," "Here the children fell a crying...."  The climax comes when the teller sees the dead mother in the face of one of the children and begins to doubt "which of them stood there before me." 

Rip Van Winkle has the same ambiguous response when he awakes and sees his own son as himself.  The children grow fainter and recede until only their "mournful features" are seen in the distance, which, "without speech," seem to communicate as if by speech: `We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all.... We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.'"  Thomas Aldrich's famous nineteenth-century story, "Marjorie Daw," in which a supposedly real character is revealed at the end to be a product of the imagination, is perhaps the most famous example of this common short story motif.  Anatole France's "Putois," in which a purely imaginary gardener is created, is another.   Variations of the motif occur throughout the century whenever there is some ambiguity within the narrative as to the psychological or phenomenological status of characters or events.

Another common creation point for the short story is when an oral tradition meets a literary tradition.  The best-known example of the literary transformation of the oral folk-tale in early nineteenth century British literature is Sir Walter Scott's insert tale in Redgauntlet, often anthologized as "Wandering Willie's Tale." Told by the blind fiddler Willie Steenson, the story has been called Scott's "only fully successful brief narrative," almost a "textbook example of the well-told tale," and Scott's greatest achievement in the ghost story.  Foregrounding the teller and thus making tone as important as story, "Wandering Willie's Tale" manifests the typical self-conscious ambiguity of the nineteenth-century short story as to whether the events recounted are supernatural or psychologically realistic.  The story has much the same combination of oral ironic voice, folk legend, and local color as Washington Irving's most famous tales and manifests much the same uncertainty about dream reality vs. external reality, albeit with less moral ambiguity, as some of the tales of Hawthorne.

"Wandering Willie's Tale" forms an interesting bridge between the traditional folk tale, in which supernatural confrontations were the stock-in-trade and the later British mystery story in which the seemingly supernatural encounter is justified in a grotesque but realistic way.  Although the Scottish dialect of Willie's telling and the somewhat trivial crux of the missing money and rent receipt on which the story depends undermine the seriousness of the supernatural, eliciting more chuckles than gasps, what makes the story differ from the old-fashioned ghost story is its thematizing the supernaturalizing of the natural which lies at the very heart of the folk tale impulse itself.  As is evident from his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Scott was familiar enough with this impulse to parody and play with the conventions that underlie it.

Both the supernatural and the natural are presented side by side in the tale to create a pattern of motifs that mocks the Lord of the manor, Sir Robert, even as it also lightly mocks supernatural explanations for the mysterious disappearance of the rent money and Steenie's consequent visit to hell to obtain the receipt he needs to prove he paid the rent.  The manifest motivation of the tale is to clear Steenie's good name, even as the satiric thrust is to cast disrepute on the name of Redgauntlet and thus register a triumph of the lower class over the higher. 

Sir Robert is presented as a powerful figure made mythical by the folk as one who has a compact with Satan, a fearsome image, which is undercut when Steenie goes to pay the master his rent, for Sir Robert dies in a grotesquely comic struggle with the gout, screaming for water to put on his legs, all the while being mocked by his pet Jack-an-ape.  The Jack-an-ape plays a crucial role in the tension between the supernatural and the real, not only by providing the naturalistic explanation for many of the seemingly supernatural events, but in being presented as a grotesque "familiar" for Sir Robert, both of whom bear the image of the fiend in the folk imagination--"a fearsome couple." 

At the end of the story Willie notes that many think the shape of the fiend that the butler saw on Sir Robert's coffin was the monkey, as it was the monkey who blew the master's silver whistle that summoned the butler to his death from fright.  It is of course the ape also who is responsible for hiding the money in the old turret called "Cat's Cradle."  Thus the monkey serves as a realistic explanation for supposed supernatural events as well as a metaphoric image of the demonic Sir Robert himself. 

Although Stennie's trip to hell to get the receipt is seemingly motivated by his drinking and his calling upon Satan to help clear his name, it is also an objectification of his exasperated reply to Sir Robert's son's question about the whereabouts of the money: it is "in hell!  with your father and his silver whistle."  The stranger who meets Steenie in his ride through the dark forest is a typical figure of nineteenth-century short fiction, used by Irving in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and Hawthorne in "Young Goodman Brown."  As do many other short fiction figures of the century, Steenie responds to his journey to a hell-like image of the Redgauntlet castle filled with ghastly revellers as if he were "like a man in a dream."  After receiving the receipt from Sir Robert and being ordered to return in one year, like Goodman Brown, Steenie calls on God's name and immediately finds himself lying in the old churchyard of the Redgauntlet parish, thinking "the whole thing was a dream, but he had the receipt in his hand."

The central ambiguity of the tale--whether the events take place in the realm of superstition and folklore or in the real world--depends on whether the Lord of the manor's good name or Steenie's reputation is to be preserved.  Because of the ambiguous tone of the teller, "Wandering Willie's Tale" marks a transition from the supernatural tale of the folk to the modern short story in which the seemingly supernatural events have either realistic or psychological explanations.  In the next phase of the British and Irish short story, with the quasi-scientific mystery stories of Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Sheridan Le Fanu, this ambiguity becomes the central concern of the narrative.

Short Story Month: 2015--Alexander Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades"

Credit for the origins of the Russian short story is split between Alexander Pushkin's Tales of Belkin (1831) and Gogol's "The Overcoat" (1842).  Although Victor Terras suggests that Pushkin initiated a general shift toward prose in Russia in the 1830s, and Charles Moser says Tales of Belkin is the most important collection of stories in Russian Literature. Pushkin's claim for being the Russian progenitor of the short story has been limited by the common charge that his stories were so much a part of a common tradition of the time that had they not been written by Pushkin they would not have received the attention they did.  However, as is typical for the development of the short story in the early 19th century, Pushkin combined previous generic conventions with his own self-conscious experimentation with prose.  Moser says that Pushkin's stories recapitulate literary tradition proceeding him, that they constitute a "parodic anthology of early 19th-century prose fiction."

The two Pushkin stories that have generated the most critical commentary, particularly concerning their generic tradition and innovation, are "The Shot" and "The Queen of Spades."  As Caryl Emerson points out, of all the controversies generated over "The Queen of Spades," the most extensive has been the generic issue of its "almost seamless fusion of the fantastic with the realistic." Like many other early 19th-century stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Hoffmann, and Gogol, all of whom have been given credit for originating the short story genre, the problem with Pushkin's most famous story, "The Queen of Spades" is that Pushkin combined so many different existing fictional conventions within it that readers have always been somewhat puzzled about how to read it.

Comparing its uncanny effect (in the basic Freudian sense of blurring the lines between imagination and reality or between map and territory) with that of stories by Poe and Hoffman, academic critics have asked the same question that all serious readers have asked of the story:  "What is to be done with this mystery, this tale of illusion?"  After summarizing the socioliterary, psychoanalytical, linguistic, and numerological studies of "Queen of Spades," Caryl Emerson concludes that the story so thoroughly and self-consciously combines inexplicable coincidence and supernatural events with a precise and reportorial mode that what Pushkin ultimately parodies in the story is the reader's search for a system or key, a figure in the carpet, that would explain it.

Basically, the plot of the story is motivated by a secret; the attempt to discover the secret generates the plot; the story ends when the secret is discovered. The secret, of course, must be a primal secret, the origins of which are in the most primitive and basic desire of the human psyche.  In this case, the secret revolves around a game of cards, possessing which would eliminate chance.  Indeed, when the countess's grandson tells of her getting a secret from the old Count, who represents himself as the Wandering Jew, and winning all three cards chosen, the listeners respond in the three basic ways that the event could be explained: chance, fairy tale, marked cards.  However, it is the fourth listener, the engineer Hermann, a man of "ardent imagination" and a gambler at heart who had never touched a card, who is most affected by the story of the secret.  "The story of the three cards produced a powerful impression upon his imagination, and all night long he could think of nothing else." 

Hermann's fascination with the secret of the three cards introduces another typical romantic short story element later explored so thoroughly by Poe--a character's powerful obsession that makes all reality contract around the object of the obsession itself.  Establishing himself as a romantic and mysterious figure standing outside the window of Lizaveta Ivanovna, the Countess's ward, much as Michael Furey does outside Gretta's window in Joyce's "The Dead," Hermann, like a character in a romance, sends the ward declarations of love, "copied word for word from a German novel."  Hermann's copied romanticism in turn infects Lizaveta, who, horrified by Hermann's boldness, enters into "secret and intimate relations" with a young man for the first time in her life.  As Hermann's letters become more impassioned, bearing "full testimony to the inflexibility of his desire and the disordered condition of his uncontrollable imagination," Lizaveta in turn becomes intoxicated and arranges, in romantic fashion, a rendezvous whereby Hermann may journey through the Countess's bedroom up a narrow winding staircase to her room. 

The fact that the journey to the maid must pass through the Countess's bedroom is, of course, not accidental, but thematically purposeful, for instead of wishing to reach the maid by means of the Countess, Hermann wishes to reach the Countess by means of the maid.  This reversal activates a grotesque mirror image in which the young lover, in Keatsean romantic fashion, is witness not to the undressing of the young girl, but rather the "repulsive mysteries" of the Countess's toilette.  Just as Silvio dismisses the occasion of the final shot as a comic illusion, the Countess tells Hermann it was all a joke.  Hermann's retort that it is not a joking matter is inevitably followed by his murder of the Countess with an empty gun

All of this mock behavior is further emphasized by Tomsky, the Countess's grandson, who describes Hermann as a "truly romantic character" a portrait that agrees with Lazaveta's own mental picture, an image that, "rendered commonplace by current novels, terrified and fascinated her imagination."  The mockery motif is continued when Hermann goes to the funeral and thinks the old Countess darts a "mocking look at him and winked with one eye," a comic image that undermines the horror of the late night visit of the Countess to give Hermann the secret which prepares the reader for a continuation of the joke gesture.  As in fairy-tale conventions, whereas possession of the secret may be harmless, actual use of it is not.  When Hermann does use the secret, he thinks he now has the ultimate power to eliminate chance and uncertainty from life; however, on the third card, expecting the ace, he draws the Queen of Spades, coming face to face with the old woman, the embodiment of the inevitability of age and death.

Self-consciously aware that he was experimenting with the conventions of narrative fiction, Pushkin has, in "The Queen of Spades" written a story, that in parodying narrative conventions, is about the basic desire that underlies all fiction--that life is not contingency and mere chance, but rather teleologically purposeful--that one can escape contingency into the realm that governs the art work, the realm of relevance, unity, meaning, and purpose.  Pushkin's theme in "The Shot" and "The Queen of Spades"--the romantic desire to impose one's own will on the world of fact, contingency, and chance--is the same theme that always pushes the stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Hoffmann, and Gogol away from ordinary reality into the realm of art; and it is this theme that compels these short-story writers to create a purely fictional or aesthetic order--not as a reflection of the real world, but as a reflection of the most basic human wish.

Short Story Month: 2015--William Carleton, "Wildgoose Lodge"

The short story has always been a more successful narrative genre for Irish writers than the novel.  The most common conjecture offered to account for this success is based on the critical assumption that the novel, primarily a realistic form, demands an established society, whereas the short story does not. And as the contemporary Irish short-story writer William Trevor points out, when the novel began in 18th-century bookish England, Ireland, largely a peasant society, was not really ready for it. As a result, Irish fiction remained aligned with its oral folklore--the oldest, most extensive folk tradition in Europe--throughout the 18th century and was not prepared for the novel's modern mode of realism until the 19th century. 

William Carleton's careful attention to specific detail and his ability to create a sense of the personality of the teller makes him the most important Irish intermediary between the old folk style and modern realism. Although Carleton's work is little known outside of Ireland, Benedict Kiely has called him "possibly the greatest writer of fiction that Ireland has given to the English language," and Yeats has said that "modern Irish literature" began with Carleton's 1830 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. 

Carleton did not perceive himself to be a creator of stories, so much as a re-creator of fact. Harold Orel notes that Carleton believed fiction and fact were inextricably mixed; thus, like many other romantic writers, such as Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, he made no real generic distinction between the terms "sketch," "story," "essay."  In many of his narratives, Carleton frequently reminds his readers that his story is based on fact, using such language as "exactly as it happened" and "strictest truth."  Orel says that this emphasis on truth was obsessive with Carleton, that he emphasized fact even when his story was written to illustrate a theory or a moral.

            This combination of fact and thematic significance signals an important shift in the development of the 19th-century short story, for a crucial problem for fiction writers of the period was how to write a story based on "real" events that illustrated a thematic idea but did not depend on the symbolic conventions of the old allegorical romance form.  One of the most important conventions to develop from this need by such romantic writers as Carleton was the creation of a personal teller whose emotionally-charged account of the event took precedence over both mimetic and didactic considerations.

Although Margaret Chesnuitt claims that Carleton goes no further than to reproduce what is ostensibly an eye-witness account in one of his best-known stories, "Wildgoose Lodge," other critics of Irish fiction generally agree that the piece, with its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its suggestive detail, is typical in technique of the modern short story developed by Poe and Hawthorne.  Barbara Hayley argues convincingly that the accuracy of Carleton's account is less important than his "skill at picking out from the real event the facts that would act most powerfully in a story." Because this "tale of terror," as Carleton tells us in a final note, "is unfortunately too true," the question it raises for students of the history of the short story is:  By what means does Carleton, without previous models, transform an event based on fact into a modern symbolic narrative with thematic significance?

Narrated by an eye-witness, the story recounts the revenge murder of an entire family by a group of Ribbonmen, a Catholic secret society.  Since Carleton was not actually present at the murder, his choice of the first person point of view is a romantic literary device--typical of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne--to emphasize the reactions of the teller.  A completed action, treated as if it were an action in process, "Wildgoose Lodge" is a classic example of how the modern romantic short-story writer developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance without resorting to allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized plot construction.

The story begins with the narrator receiving a summons to a secret meeting of the society to which he belongs.  Although the summons has nothing extraordinary or startling about it, he has a premonition of approaching evil; an "undefinable feeling of anxiety pervades [his] whole spirit," very much like the undefined sense of anxiety that pervades the spirit of many of Poe's narrators, such as the unnamed narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" when he first rides into view of the ominous house.  Moreover, like many Poe narrators, Carleton's narrator says he cannot define the presentiment or sense of dread he feels, for it seems to be a mysterious faculty, like Poe's "perverse," beyond human analysis.  Although Carleton never wrote about his theory of the construction of fictional narrative, it is clear that "Wildgoose Lodge's presentation of the past as presage makes possible the kind of tight unity popularized by Poe in which even the first sentence seems self-consciously aimed toward the climax and denouement.

Another self-conscious literary device Carleton uses is the creation of a thematically-appropriate atmosphere surrounding the events by describing the day as gloomy and tempestuous beyond anything he remembers.  Moreover, the fact that the meeting in which the murders are planned takes place in a church and involves ceremonies of brotherhood is perceived by the narrator to be bitterly ironic.  This ironic contrast is further emphasized when the narrator describes the devilish malignancy of the Ribbonman captain as "demon-like," "Satanic," "supernatural," and "savage."

When the captain slams his fist down on the altar bible to swear an oath of the horrifying revenge he plans, the candle goes out, a sound of rushing wings fills the church, and a mocking echo of his words in "supernatural tones" seems to resound throughout the building.  In what would be comic in any other framework, the captain explains that the candle was snuffed out by a pigeon that sat directly above it, and the narrator apologizes for not pointing out that pigeons had built nests among the rafters--a mundane explanation for the seemingly supernatural rustling of wings.  That Carleton's narrator conveniently neglects to mention the pigeons until he has used them to create a quasi-supernatural and symbolically meaningful effect is simply another indication of his self-conscious use of unifying fictional techniques to transform a factual event into a literary occasion.

The actual scene of the revenge murders is also described symbolically, for the torrential rains have created a lake in the meadow where the house lies, isolating it on a small island in the middle so that the Ribbonmen have to create a human bridge over which they can travel to reach it.  The description of the murders is graphic and horrifying.  When a woman leans out the window and cries for mercy, her hair aflame, she is "transfixed with a bayonet and a pike" so that the word "mercy" is divided in her mouth.  When the captain pushes the final victim back into the flames, the narrator's transformation of the events into a mythic, symbolic story is complete.  As the fire throws its light on the faces of the murderers, "the scene seemed to be changed to hell, the murderers to spirits of the damned, rejoicing over the arrival and the torture of some guilty soul."  The story ends with the narrator affirming that although the language of the story is partly fictitious, the facts are close to those revealed at the trial of the murderers, which resulted in over two dozen men being hanged in different parts of County Louth.

What makes "Wildgoose Lodge" a modern short story is the heightened perception of the engaged first-person narrator, who is both dramatically involved and ironically distant at once, and the story's selection of metaphoric detail to make an implied ironic moral judgment.  The atmospheric weather, the ironic church setting, the physically isolated house, and the imagery of the leader as Satanic and his closest followers as fiendish shift the emphasis in the story from mere eyewitness account to a tight thematic structure.

Short Story Month: 2015--Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto"

The gothic romance, which enjoyed a revival during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has as significant an influence on the development of the short story as the moral exemplum and the essay. Many critics have pointed out the basically religious, spiritual, romantic nature of gothic fiction. David Punter argues that the gothic writers insist that the world is much more mysterious and terrifying, much less explicable in terms of cause and effect, than realism suggests.

S. L. Varnado has shown how Rudolf Otto's concept of the numinous is integrally related to the basic spirit of gothic fiction. Using short fictions such as Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," Henry James' "The Jolly Corner," and Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" as his examples, Varnado explains how such characteristics as "harmony of contrasts," "the wholly other," and "emptiness," which Otto describes as central characteristics of the "unnamed Something" he calls the numinous, are also characteristic of the gothic spirit.  Such descriptions of the numinous and the gothic are of course echoed in Frank O'Connor's famous remark about our approaching the short story in the mood of Pascal's saying: "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie."

Thus, it is no accident that the first fictional work in English literature to have a marked effect on the 19th-century short story form is Horace Walpole's prototypical gothic romance, "The Castle of Otranto" (1765), for in it, Walpole, heir to the development of "realistic" fiction that originated in Boccaccio's rebellion against the old medieval romance, self-consciously combined conventions of both realism and romance.  In his famous "Preface" to the second edition, Walpole tells us his work is an attempt to blend two kinds of romance--the ancient and the modern. "In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success." 

Noting that fancy had been damned up by an adherence to common life in modern fiction, whereas in the ancient romance nature or reality was excluded, Walpole characterized his reconciliation task as one in which while "leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations," he would construct "the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability: in short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women do in extraordinary positions."

However, precisely because Walpole's ordinary people are placed in extraordinary situations, his characters do not remain "ordinary," that is, "as-if-real"; instead, they become transformed into illustrative figures.  For even though the characters in his fiction seem to be motivated by individual psychologies, the placing of them in extreme situations transforms them into psychological embodiments.  As a result, Elizabeth MacAndrew points out in her study of gothic traditions in fiction, Walpole's characters occupy a "hazy no-man's land between the abstraction of allegory and the 'reality' of social and comic novels."

 The result of this ambiguous mixture of motivation, in which characters seem both driven by some pre-established force of the projective story itself and by their own obsessive desires, is that, as Robert Harbison points out, readers of gothic fiction are kept outside the center of the story so that character motives are "a closed book," making their movements seem unnatural" (164).  Indeed the mystery of motivation--what makes Goodman Brown go into the forest or Bartleby prefer not to, for example, is a central problem of the 19th-century short story.

The basic story of "The Castle of Otranto" is the family romance--the mystery of paternity and the problem of who shall rule.  Manfred, the "father," wishes to continue his reign over the house, but he must inevitably be displaced by the "son."  Theodore, the true heir, replaces the false son, Conrad, when he dies on his wedding day.  Theodore then makes the discovery that every son makes, that he is the true heir; but to inherit, he must marry the father's daughter.  However, the father also wishes to marry the daughter to assure the continuance of his rule of the house.  All this is "displaced" in the story in the Freudian dream sense and emphasized by overdetermination of roles.  There are, for example, three "fathers" in the tale: Manfred, Frederick, and Jerome; two "sons": Conrad and Theodore; two "daughters": Isabelle and Matilda; and one "mother": Hippolita.  In structure, "The Castle of Otranto" is a story in which all characters and thus all motifs are closely and obsessively related.

In a story that sounds like a fantasy taking place in a castle described as a child's playhouse, the plot moves toward the fulfillment of the central prophecy of the family romance: that the castle and the lordship shall pass from the present family when the real owner of the castle shall be grown too large to inhabit it.  The manifest plot develops as a dream-like fantasy of the true owner, Alfonso, growing physically so large that the castle is finally rent into pieces.  This, however, is a displaced version of the story of the son wresting control of the house from the father when he grows old enough or so "big" that there is no room for two men there.  Theodore, the true heir, the grandson of Alfonso, growing old enough to displace the father figure, Manfred, constitutes the latent plot.

The story begins with Manfred's attempt to replace the sickly, son Conrad, who is destroyed by the fall of the enormous helmet, a symbol for the child's perception of the father's phallus.  With this death, Manfred desires to marry the intended bride of the son, who, because she is his intended daughter-in-law, is a displaced version of the daughter herself.  In fact, after Conrad's death, Manfred says to Isabella that he does not want a daughter, suggesting the unspoken taboo desire that the daughter also be wife; he demeans the sickly son as unworthy of her, telling Isabella that being in the prime of age he will know how to value her beauties.  When Isabella flees Manfred's incestuous and "impious intentions," she encounters Theodore, who, after having been temporarily trapped by the giant helmet, has escaped to an underground vault from whence he is "born" to begin his efforts to take his rightful place as ruler of the castle.

These displacements are suggested by the several identity confusions that take place throughout the story. At first, Isabella mistakes Theodore for the ghost of the dead son, Conrad. When Theodore first meets Matilda, he confuses her with Isabella. Both sons and both daughters are overdetermined embodiments of "son" and "daughter" respectively.  Matilda, the daughter of Manfred, has "fallen in love" with a portrait image of the true father, Alfonso, the grandfather of Theodore.  Alfonso is the romance version of the true knight, embodied in Theodore, who will rescue Matilda/Isabella from the tyrannical father.  However, Manfred plots to symbolically castrate the son Theodore by having his head cut off. Meanwhile, Theodore, dressing in the armor of his grandfather, prepares to fulfill another prophecy made to Isabella's father Frederic, that only by the blood of Alfonso will she be saved; and it is indeed Alfonso's blood in Theodore that must accomplish this salvation.

However, Manfred proposes a double marriage: Frederic shall marry Manfred's daughter and Manfred shall marry Frederic's daughter.  This overdetermination of symbols is the displaced version of the father's desire for the daughter as wife to assure the maintenance of his right to the castle.  That this doubling and overdetermination is central to the understanding of the latent story is also indicated by the climactic event when Manfred, mistaking Matilda for Isabella, stabs her.  With her death, the giant figure of Alfonso throws the castle into ruins and Theodore, the true heir, is enthroned.  Manfred is exiled and Theodore marries Isabella, the displaced version of the sister, Matilda. 

With its stereotypical figures of the tyrannical father, the saint-like mother, the virgin daughter, and the prince disguised as a peasant; the story has many of the same kinds of figures we are familiar with in fairy tale, and thus it seems to have its source in dreams.  The work is similar to the old romance in that the characters are more like psychological archetypes than real people, but it is like the realistic novel at the same time in that the characters are driven by their own conscious desires.  The story must therefore be read as a manifest plot in which characters act out their desires, but also as a latent plot in which desire itself becomes objectified and embodied. Consequently, statements in the surface plot are often double entendre for the latent plot, and seemingly gratuitous errors and absurd accidents in the surface action are determined and meaningful in the latent action.  Ultimately, whereas much makes no sense on the surface plot, everything makes sense on the latent level, i.e. is unified by the obsessive coherence of the taboo psychological story underlying the absurd supernatural surface.

This transformation of "real" people into parable figures by the latent thrust of the traditional romance story is characteristic of 19th-century short fiction. It is effected by means of the displacement process, understood both psychologically and aesthetically. For Freud, the term suggests that taboo desires are displaced to permissible objects and that we can only uncover the taboo desire by correctly interpreting the overdetermination of symbols and corresponding motifs. For Northrop Frye, displacement signifies the writer's efforts to create a sense of verisimilitude for the actions of characters in an essentially code-bound story. We can see how both forms of displacement are at work here, as the latent story of the family romance is displaced to psychologically-real figures, but is revealed through the overdetermination of corresponding repeated motifs rather than by means of the purely two-dimensional figures of the old romance form.

The combination of opposing generic conventions results in the "tonal and modal discordances" that Elizabeth Napier calls one of the story's most striking characteristic features and also accounts for most of the work's comedy. As in the sketches of Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving, the reader does not know whether to respond to the characters as real or as representative, for in fact, in such a transitional period of the genre's development, they are indeed both.  

As will be discussed later, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville struggle with the same ambiguous mixture. The difference is that whereas Walpole creates a puzzle with scattered pieces based on the latent taboo psychological plot, Poe creates a puzzle based on laying bare the naturalistic explanation for the seemingly supernatural events. Poe makes the unconscious obsessive unity that holds Walpole's story together into a conscious basis for his aesthetic theory of the unity of the short story.

Short Story Month: 2-015--Daniel Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal"

 British short fiction is generally ignored by critics, even though several historians of the form have suggested that the development of the short story in America in the early 19th century owes much to generic forms predominant in England in the 18th century.  For example, both Henry Seidel Canby and Fred Lewis Pattee in their early 20th-century histories of the short story suggest that Washington Irving's success was due as much to his use of 18th-century English essay conventions as it was to his use of folklore material.  Pattee even goes so far as to say that it is precisely at the point in Irving's work "where in him the Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of romanticism that there was born the American short story, a new genre, something distinctively and unquestionably our own in the world of literature."

However, regardless of this debt the 19th-century short story may owe to English literature of the 18th century, little has been done to establish the generic characteristics of English short fiction during that period and to make clear the distinctive nature of those few short fictions of the period that seem to serve as harbingers of the blossoming of the short story yet to come.

 The most familiar pre-19th-century English short narrative is Daniel Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal" (1706).  In an era that saw the development of the new realism and the rise of the novel that dominated English fiction throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this short piece clearly indicates the separation between two basic forms of fiction--narratives presented "as if" the events actually took place and narratives presented as inventions or mental projections.  "A True Relation" confronts the issue of "fact" versus "fiction" so emphatically that it can serve as a model for discussion of how short fiction begins to deal with this combination of conventions.

At first, the piece was considered a simple fabrication created by Defoe to advance the sale of a popular theological work, Charles Drelincourt's On Death; and in fact the "True Relation" was often appended to Drelincourt's work.  From this point of view, Defoe's story can be seen as a variant of the typical 18th-century narrative written to illustrate a moral. Edward W. Pitcher has discussed the conventions of this "marriage of realism to didacticism," pointing out how important it was for such narratives in The Spectator to establish the credentials of the teller and assure the reader that the events described actually took place.

 However, the story has most often been discussed as an early example of the kind of realistic conventions Defoe used to help establish the novel as a viable narrative form. In the late 19th century, Charles Stephens called "A True Relation" an illustration of Defoe's typical fictional technique, the main merit of which, Stephens said, is "in direct proportion to the intrinsic merit of a plain statement of fact." Such has become the standard view of the piece.  For example, Edward Wagenknecht, in his Cavalcade of the English Novel, says with its use of "testimony skillfully adduced, verisimilitude, corroborative and irrelevant detail, minute particularity," the story "offers in miniature virtually all Defoe's salient qualities, thus affording an excellent introduction to the study of his technique." From this point of view, the story becomes interesting as an exercise in verisimilitude, a footnote to the methods of the origins of the realistic novel.

 In addition to being cited as an early example of the old moral tale and the new narrative of verisimilitude, "A True Relation" has also been called an example of the gothic mode that began to dominate English short fiction at the turn of the century.  From this perspective, the piece is worth considering for the manner in which it presents the kind of ghostly apparition that before the 18th century might well have been accepted in folklore stories as an article of belief.  Thus, the story attempts to validate what did not need to be validated before. As David Punter notes, this is the typical structural tension of gothic fiction.  On the one hand, because it rejects realism's view of the world, it makes use of metaphoric and symbolic techniques, but on the other hand because it does not wish to be regarded as mere fantasy, it needs to establish its validity within the work itself, thus giving rise to increasingly complex verification techniques.  

Defoe tries to retain the antirealist significance of the old romance form within a culture in which the spiritual significance of the old legends, ballads, and folk-tales was no longer tenable. Modes of validation, such as the common 19th-century convention of presenting an eye-witness account, dominate the story. The eye-witness account, which the dramatized "author" can claim is "truth" because he is presenting it just as he received it, is complicated in "Mrs. Veal" because the piece includes both oral and written modes of discourse.

"A True Relation" therefore looks backward to the most traditional form of short narrative--the fable presented to teach a moral lesson--and forward to the realistic story presented for its own sake as an account of an actual event.  To see it as the first kind of story is to see it as being motivated primarily by the metaphoric significance of the moral lesson in order to convince the reader of its spiritual truth.  To see it as the second kind is to see it motivated by metonymic detail for the purpose of convincing the reader of its truth to physical reality.  What makes "A True Relation" historically interesting is that it foregrounds this duality so emphatically.

  The case is made even more engaging by the discovery that "A True Relation" is not fiction at all, at least not in the sense that the events are a fabrication, but rather a piece of journalism. Whether the actual event of the apparition appearing to Mrs. Bargrave took place is unsure, but we do know that Defoe interviewed a woman named Bargrave who supposedly was paid a visit by her friend Mrs. Veal after her death.  With this information, the fact/fictionality issue takes on another dimension and raises new issues.

The short preface to the story insists that the "relation" is "matter of fact, and attended with such circumstances as may induce any reasonable man to believe it."  Indeed the basic issue here that separates the story from earlier accounts of the supernatural is that it appeals to a conviction governed by reason rather than a belief governed by superstition. The eyewitness, Mrs. Bargrave, tells the story to a neighbor woman, who then tells it to a kinsman, who then tells it to a justice of the peace, who writes it down and sends it to a friend in London. 

The narrative is thus filtered from the eyewitness through two speakers and then two different writers who create and transmit the manuscript.  We are not told whether the friend in London is the one who submits it to print or not.  Both the neighbor woman "teller" and the justice of the peace "writer" are attested to as intelligent and discerning people, who present the story as being in the same words that the neighbor woman had from Mrs. Bargrave's own mouth, "as near as may be," and that Mrs. Bargrave had no reason to invent the story, being a woman of honesty, virtue, and piety. The writer of the preface then insists that the "use" to which we should put the "relation" is a conventional moral one; that is, that there is life to come and a just God who will mete out rewards and retribution; therefore, we should live in such a way that may be pleasing to God.

Although Defoe did not invent the ghostly encounter, he did invent the oral narrator, the neighbor woman who supplies us with more information than about the encounter itself; and it is this additional information that creates a context for the central event which makes the issue of fact or fiction in the piece more interesting than simply the fact or fiction of the apparition itself.  For example,  the narrator tells us that Mrs. Bargrave and Mrs. Veal are not only childhood friends, but that they both had unkind fathers and that Mrs. Veal considers Mrs. Bargrave her only friend in the world.

In addition, we are told that Mrs. Bargrave has a wicked husband from whom she suffers and that Mrs. Veal is under the care of a brother because she is given to fits that make her deviate "from her discourses very abruptly to some impertinence."  Because this information is not central to the basic issue either of the truth of the story or the moral lesson, we may take these details as either thematically "free" motifs, that is, irrelevant except in terms of verisimilitude, or we may take them to be thematically "bound" motifs, that is, relevant to the structure and meaning of the story in a way that previous critics have ignored.

The nature of discourse is of course the central subject of the story, not only in the conversation or discourse in which Mrs. Veal engages with Mrs. Bargrave, but also in the contextual frame story.  In the actual encounter, Mrs. Veal has Mrs. Bargrave run and fetch two kinds of discourse--first the copy of Drelincourt's On Death, which they have read and discussed before, and then some verses that Mrs. Bargrave has copied down in her own hand from Friendship in Perfection. Mrs. Veal's own discourse is about discourse, for first she talks about Drelincourt's book to comfort Mrs. Bargrave that her current affliction under her wicked husband shall be removed from her in Heaven, and then she talks about the writings of the "primitive Christians" which, unlike the "frothy, vain discourse" of the current age, was for edification.  At this point there is an abrupt shift from "heavenly" discourse to legal discourse--a letter that Mrs. Veal wants Mrs. Bargrave to write to her brother, telling him that she wishes certain rings and a purse of gold to be left to acquaintances.  Mrs. Bargrave takes this shift to be a sign of one of Mrs. Veal's fits coming on, for it indicates an abrupt transition from the main train of the discourse to "an impertinence."

  The "relation" of the actual visit and the discourse of Mrs. Veal accounts for less than half the piece. The remainder deals with the context. Thus, fully as much of the piece is about the telling of the story as it is about the story itself. Therefore, it seems clear that the subject of the story is not the "apparition" of Mrs. Veal, but the "relation" of the apparition.  First there is the explicit question of the truth of Mrs. Bargrave's relation, which is questioned by Mrs. Veal's brother, who insists that it is a "reflection."  Although the meaning of this term is not clear in the story, it seems to suggest the opposite of "true relation," and therefore suggests the Lockean view that knowledge either comes from sensation or from "reflection," that is, from the external world or from the mind itself. 

The issue of physical truth versus mental truth is also raised by Mrs. Veal's brother when he insists that while Mrs. Bargrave may not be lying, she has been "crazed" by her cruel husband.  This dichotomy of mental versus physical is also mentioned in Mrs. Veal's discourse when she laments to Mrs. Bargrave about the eyes of faith not being as open as the eyes of the body.  It is a motif suggested by the narrator when she notes that those who first hear Mrs. Bargrave's story satisfy themselves that she is no hypochondriac; that is, she is not affected by vapors from the hypochondria, not a melancholy person who confuses the physical with the mental, taking the latter to be the former.

 The narrator of the story is not content with simply relating the event of the apparition; he spends much time both justifying it and explaining it.  For example, Mrs. Veal's digression from her heavenly discourse to request the bequeathing of certain items is accounted for by the narrator thus: "The design of it appears to me to be only in order to make Mrs. Bargrave so to demonstrate the truth of her appearance, as to satisfy the world of the reality thereof as to what she had seen and heard...." 

Moreover, the narrator does not believe that Mrs. Bargrave could "hatch such an invention" in such a short time, for she did not jumble the circumstances, nor did she have any interest or thing to gain.  The narrator ends her relation by indicating that she has been much affected by the story and is thoroughly convinced of its factual nature. As she points out, "why we should dispute matter of fact because we cannot solve things of which we have no certain demonstrative notions, seems strange to me. Mrs. Bargrave's authority and sincerity alone would have been undoubted in any other case."

"A True Relation" must be taken in several different ways at once.  First of all, although it is presented as a moral tale, it is much more detailed and specific than other "moral tales" or illustrative essays of the early 18th century in which the sincerity of the teller alone was sufficient to persuade the reader of the truth of the event.  Furthermore, the event of the tale, which can be taken as illustrative of the moral lesson of heavenly reward, is so "extraordinary" and unusual because it involves accepting as truth something that the reader's common sense and reason would deny.  Thus, the story's truth does not depend on reason, logic, and common sense, but rather on the specific detail of the account itself.  Mrs. Bargrave's ability to specify what Mrs. Veal was wearing and to particularize the actual encounter attests to its truth to the reader, just as her general sincerity attests to its truth to the listener, the neighbor narrator.

It little matters, in terms of the technique of the tale, whether the apparition actually appeared to Mrs. Bargrave or not, nor does it matter that Defoe takes the incident from an actual account by Mrs. Bargrave.  What does matter is the process by which the relation becomes a story.  "A True Relation" becomes a story through the dual means by which all accounts become stories--by being aware of itself as "relation" rather than "event" and by being unified or "held together" through repeated motifs that constitute its theme, in this case the psychological theme of mental versus physical events.  This thematic content suggests the basic dichotomy between events described as if they actually took place and events presented as pure projections of the mind, that is, the dichotomy between romance and realism. Whether an event actually took place or whether a central character or narrator is "crazed" and has simply hallucinated the event is one of the most common foregrounded concerns of short fiction in the 19th century.

It is understandable why such a theme would be more a concern in short fiction than in long fiction. The authority for the event (for after all, short fiction usually presents "an event" rather than an abstraction based on events) has been central to short fiction since Boccaccio, the "truth" of whose tales was predicated on the teller having heard them from someone else who attests to their validity as having actually happened. Short fiction lies between the romance convention of presenting marvelous events and the realistic convention of presenting events as if they actually happened, even though the events themselves depart from the ordinary course of things. 

A story, to be a story, must be worth the telling, says Thomas Hardy late in the 19th century.  And the various justifications for what makes a story worth telling has been a crucial issue in short fiction since tales were worth telling because they had some "use" or because they entertained by relating an event that broke up the ordinary course of things.  "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal" raises all these issues in a particularly self-conscious and foregrounded way and thus raises issues about the nature of discourse, the modes of discourse, the uses of discourse, and the means of transmission of discourse that dominate the short fiction form throughout the 19th century. 

What makes Defoe's piece a story is its own foregrounded focus on itself as a "relation" of an event which can be accounted for by the appeal both to the techniques of realism and the thematics of romance, that is, by the presentation of an experience as being both ambiguously actual event and a mental projection. This crucial ambiguity, bound up in a tight thematic unity of interwoven motifs, characterizes the stories of Hawthorne and Poe, commonly thought to mark the beginning of the short story form.

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.