For And Against The Short Story

Essays

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the weekly essay for ‘Castalia.’ Sorry this goes on so long. As with much of the writing here, this is essentially about thinking out loud - in this case, I was trying to think through what a short story really ‘is’ and was clearly very ambivalent about it.

Just to be in the habit of mentioning it, I’ve turned the paid feature on. Many thanks to those who have upgraded their subscription! I believe there’s just a button to click on on the upper right hand corner of the screen, but let me know if there’s any difficult with it.

Best,

Sam

FOR AND AGAINST THE SHORT STORY

When I was in college and the ‘serious’ writing classes were dedicated to the short story – usually producing one pellucid, well-crafted short story per semester – I made a point of never taking those classes. ‘Craft’ struck me as a terrible word and it still does. And as a branch of the English department, the short story seemed to always mean one thing, realistic, poignant work, tightly unified, written in a humble, unobtrusive style that could inshallah be sent as part of an MFA application package to the University of Iowa.

These crafted short stories had nothing to do with what I cared about – which was the free play of ideas, personality, and imagination in text – and there was something I found suspicious in the whole genre, too readymade for magazine printing and work sample-packaging.

And even now, when I’ve spent the past couple of years obsessing about short stories, I have most of the same misgivings. It is a problematic genre, oddly mysterious. It does have the misfortune of being an appendage to magazines, basically a concoction of magazines to seem a bit more high-brow, and I find it embarrassing to the broader cause of literature that everybody, reading The New Yorker, skips straight over the short story. The usual advocacy for the short story is mortifying as well – the standard comparison of reading short stories to eating potato chips; the very equivocal recommendation of Loren Stein, writing about John O’Hara, that short stories can be read the way people binge on television episodes.

Here’s what I love about short stories:

• They are a showcase for the writer, they represent something very close to the writer’s pure vision and pure style without getting bogged down in all the machinery of the novel. For people who are more interested in writers than in plots or stories, it’s hard to imagine a better introduction to someone’s work than a sampling of several of their stories.

• They are built around a single idea. Very often, novels turn into a sort of shaggy-dog story, drifting along, picking up this interest of the writer’s, spotlighting that aspect of their talent, working feverishly to conform to the outlines of the story, and short stories don’t at all have that problem with obfuscation: they say something, their form – the compression inherent in the form – commits them to a single idea, a single impulse that the writer truly believes in.

• They have a lightness about them. Melodrama, complicated fictional machinery, are almost necessarily absent from the short story – and so, too, are overwrought ideas about the writer-as-suffering-artist. Chekhov copied down approvingly a little parable by Alphonse Daudet. “Why are thy songs so short?” a bird was once asked. “Is it because thou art so short of breath?” To which the other bird replied, “I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.” The truly great short story writers, Turgenev, Chekhov, Borges, etc, all seem to have a similar lightness to them – a feeling of wandering through a bright, complex, variegated creation and making as many sketches, as many observations, as their energy and intelligence will allow. It is an extremely attractive, fecund way to be a creative person, very Mozartian, without the sturm und drang implicit in the novel.

The problem is that, in a very strange way, it can be unbearable to read short stories. The issue, I think, is that we feel it’s off-handed work, the writer hasn’t sacrificed enough, and their fictional world is only sketchily outlined, which is what leads to that glutted feeling as in the analogies to eating snack food or binge-watching television. What’s worse, because short stories are so unitary in their form, it’s very difficult to go off on diversions, on set-pieces, ruminations, philosophical speculations, all the byways that make writing and reading so pleasurable. Short stories can have a very unliterary disposition, and the current alliance between the MFA workshops and the middle-brow magazines makes them seem, as often as not, factory-made.

Everybody who writes about the short story makes a point of what a recent invention they are – a mid-19th century phenomenon, as distinct from the older ‘tale.’ And some of the limitations of the modern short story can be traced back to its genesis – the instant affiliation with magazines, the flavor of the Industrial Revolution and the urge to optimize all creative content, the advent of middle class realism as the only fit subject for serious writing, and, most importantly, a kind of narrowing of the sources of the short story. The history of the short story (at least the standard version) looks like this. There used to be the tale, a shaggy, discursive sub-genre with a certain whimsical, gothic aspect. Around the 1840s, under the pressure of the great modernizing impulse that changed, almost overnight, the whole mentality of the Western world, the tale compressed itself into the short story, which was distinguished by its totalizing structure. The key innovators are Herman Melville – and it’s appropriate that one of the first defining short stories, ‘Bartleby The Scrivener,’ deals with the deadening effects of work and modern industrial processes; Ivan Turgenev, who moves sociologically in the other direction, with lyrical, airy depictions of a way of life in the Russian countryside that he knows full well is about to disappear; and Edgar Allan Poe, who in this context is above all important as a critic with his dictum: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.”

Painting of Turgenev hunting

As literary history, the short story is a surprisingly under-studied, ill-defined subject, but this demarcation between tales and stories – the line in the sand drawn around the 1840s – does seem basically right. It’s a bit startling to read, for instance, Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ which was written in 1820, and to realize how little attention Irving – a perfectly well-educated, skillful writer – paid to trying to harmonize the various aspects of his work. The beginning is a quaint tale about the manners of old Dutch New York centering on an unhappy love story; the ending is a horror story. Both are charming, it’s not at all clear if either one has anything to do with the other, and Irving doesn’t seem to care in the slightest – there’s some suggestion that the whole second part is an elaborate prank stemming from the love triangle of the first part, but that would just be a plot device; there’s no interest in any kind of psychological consistency, in the story as a total work of art in the way Poe envisaged it. And, pretty clearly, the subsequent critical attempts to sort out ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ have little to do with Irving’s conception: he obviously had two separate plots, liked them both, found them to be somewhat environmentally linked, so threw them into the same narrative, sort of in the way that medieval or Renaissance artists might stick a completely unrelated scene in the background of one of their paintings.

Once Madame Bovary was written, and the terms of modern literature defined, that sort of loose-fitting structure, like Irving’s, became unthinkable. The rest of the history of the 19th century short story is as undercard to the reformation of the novel – with Maupassant in particular acting as a kind of deputy to Flaubert, producing a middle class, realist short story that was slick, stylistically unified, and satisfying, a pleasant hors d’oeuvre compared to a serious novel like Bovary or Anna Karenina.

The ‘hissed writers’ (and short story innovators) - Daudet, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev - gathered around a table, 1874

And then, with Chekhov, the short story simultaneously comes into its own and calcifies itself. It’s been a bit of a pain to me the last few years to have been writing in two forms – plays and short stories – that have come to be entirely defined by one person, but in short stories Chekhov’s influence is particularly all-pervading.

So what makes the Chekhov short story, which really is the realistic short story? (As William Boyd puts it in a very intelligent essay on the short story, “the short story in the 20th century is almost exclusively Chekhovian….perhaps all short stories written after Chekhov are one way or another in his debt.”)

• The preeminence of daily life. A kind of religion of the immediate and quotidian; a sense that all drama, all exciting stories, are a kind of delusion, a way of distracting oneself from ever-present, ever-excruciating truth.

• Poignancy. The quiet, telling moment that encapsulates an entire life, whether the protagonists have any awareness of it or not. To achieve that effect, a characteristic narration style develops – limited third person, the narrator as a tender, detached voice, like a steady, quiet observer in a roomful of loudmouths (‘fly on the wall’ is how the authorial perspective is usually summarized). There is very little of the Olympian narrative sensibility associated with Tolstoy’s novels and almost none of the philosophical or historical digressions – the narrative tends to be linked with one particular character in the story, the one who is most evocative of the social environment being depicted, very often a quiet, easily-overlooked character. The story follows them beat-by-beat through a situation, the more ordinary the better, in which, very quietly, inconspicuously, the protagonist is shattered.

• The emphasis on family and social dynamics. The point is never a character or some extraordinary figure, as in Childe Harold or A Hero Of Our Time, novella-ish work from an earlier era. The characters in a Chekhov short story are always understood to be stand-in, emblematic of a more universal reality. We’re not actually interested in the characters of a Chekhov story, although they may be beautifully described – notice that it’s almost impossible to remember the names of modern short story characters, they don’t stick with you in the way that characters in novels or TV shows do, and it’s very rare to put characters’ names in the titles, which was pro forma in the older tales – they act behavioristically, are set against some sort of psychological or sociological matrix, and their fate, as it were, is pre-ordained from the initial setup of the story. Once it’s introduced, for instance, that Nanny Varka is poor and overworked and dealing with a unsleeping infant, the rest of the story is determined; just as the idle vacationer Gurov’s fate is completely evident from the moment he hears about an attractive new arrival at Yalta. The design is so totalizing, so thematically contained, that it admits of no real volition from the characters whatsoever – like in some strict Calvinistic theology in which a human becomes a cog in an invisible, inscrutable plan.

All of these traits have been so widely-imitated that they have come to be inextricable from the short story. Read through a set of contemporary short stories at random, New Yorker stories, for instance, or The Best American Short Stories, and the overwhelming majority will share Chekhov’s phenotype.

But there is another trait of Chekhov’s, which I think is essential to him, and addictive in the subsequent career of the short story, and which gives me real misgivings – and that’s a doctorly detachment, a sense that he sees everything clearly, can diagnose everything expertly, that he has a certain solicitude for his patients but also an abiding condescension, he knows them better than they know themselves. In theater, his long shadow has created what I think of as a deeply smug style of playwriting, the characters are trapped in a room, can’t find their way out, the audience is a step ahead always and vacillates between contempt and compassion in watching them squirm. Thanks to him, the ideal short story has come to be cold, clinical, brutal, I’m thinking of Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, the characters floundering around with their various hopes and delusions, the writer systematically, cruelly reeling them in. (I flipped open a Joyce Carol Oates story just to be sure I wasn’t unfairly condemning her and the first sentence I came across was “Death was coming for them but they didn’t know” – it would be hard to find a better example to bolster my point.)

Portrait of Chekhov - winner of Lit Hub’s contest for Chekhov pictures as ranked by hotness

So this is what I’m dreaming of – a path out of the Chekhov short story, to something that has more freedom in it and more heart. As with Chekhov’s plays, though, his shadow is hard to escape – his work really is masterful, he had a vivid sense of the modern condition, and the texture of his stories is so clean and confident that it becomes hard to envision anything else. And a few of the celebrated rebellions – the much-bruited post-modern fiction of the ’60s; the current advent of flash fiction – strike me as aesthetic dead ends. The Bartheleme story just seems to be – when it’s at all cogent – like a high-brow joke. And the gnomic Lydia Davis short story, which was supposed to inaugurate a whole wave of extremely short, parable-like fiction, just comes across as completely unlived and unfelt, as literary as a Post-it; at their best, the Davis stories read like a note for a much longer story; at their worst, they’re like an ad jingle you can’t get out of your head. The Bartheleme story still has some afterlife – for university wiseacres to play small practical jokes on their writing seminars. The Davis short story may go on to have better luck with different writers. I’m sympathetic to this kind of story – the critic David Shields makes a good case for it in Reality Hunger – a story without fictional artifice, in which the writer just says what they really want to, without going to all the trouble of characters and settings, but, in practice, it never seems to work, it’s too nakedly a ploy for attention, a caving to a click-bait market (like one of these online articles advertising that it can be read in <1 minute).

There have been two semi-successful rebellions. One is what Harold Bloom calls the ‘alternate tradition’ of the short story, which originates from Gogol and runs through Kafka, Walser, Borges, and Calvino. The other can I guess be called the modernist short story, with Hemingway and Babel as its most prominent exponents – although its real deviation from Chekhov is in an unexpected direction.

It’s fitting that Gogol should spearhead the most prominent, most successful rebellion, since he comes from just beyond the horizon of the modern short story. ‘The Nose’ was written in 1836 and is very much a tale in the old style. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ which are sometimes credited as the first short stories, were published in 1837 – and were the spur for Poe’s critical dictums, which laid the tracks for the modern short story. Poe proscribed a total work of art, intrinsically unified, in which everything connected. Gogol would have horrified him – all of the feints, the homunculi who are constantly named and described and then either appear in the story for a second or never materialize at all, the constant leaps of illogic.

In terms of narration, Gogol is absolutely in the framework of the tale, in which the identity of the narrator, the narrator’s proximity to the event described, is always a fraught subject. The tale is most suited for inns and the leisurely pace of pre-modern travel – although it transposes itself readily to Sholem Alocheim’s third-class carriage. Hence the endless fascination in the 19th century, even as the short story was coming to be formalized and truncated, for the matryoshka doll structure of narration, as, for instance, in Conrad, the narrator telling the writer something that he heard from an acquaintance who heard it from some questionable source while on a sea voyage on the other side of the world – and the whole pleasure of storytelling is the feeling of having one’s leg pulled, of being in a winding, formless fictional universe where the story can drop in and out of sight. Which enables Gogol to write, in ‘The Nose,’: “Here again the whole incident is shrouded in fog and what happened afterwards is completely unknown.” Contrast that with the prevailing narration of the modern short story – the unblinking eye at its cool distance, the absence of digressions, the sense of a completely circumscribed, polished fictional world. (It’s not a surprise, for instance, that the two compliments most valued in the contemporary fiction ‘workshops’ in which the short story has taken root are ‘well-crafted’ and ‘economical.’)

The Gogol story went completely underground in the 19th century and then emerged suddenly and unexpectedly in the German world with Kafka and Walser and then again with Borges and Calvino. These writers all have differences but their short stories are of a completely cloth from Chekhov’s. The critical point is the absence of any sort of boundary between the world of the short story and the larger universe. There’s no feeling of totality, no feeling of getting, as Poe wrote, “a sense of the fullest satisfaction,” connected to “a pre-established design.” The analogy is to the fable or the fragment or the dream. Kafka’s ‘Eleven Sons’ is just a quick survey of eleven stories Kafka was trying to write. Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’ is, like many of his stories, specifically a meditation on the infinite, an insistence that bordering is a useless endeavor. Robert Walser’s extremely short stories feel, generally, like a single moment plucked at random, very trivial, very unformed, elucidating the randomness and infinitude of existence. Harold Bloom calls this tradition ‘nightmare phantasmagorias.’ If the Lydia Davis short story – flash fiction – is to work, it needs to somehow connect back to Gogol, to be something other than random jottings, an actual tapping into a dreamscape, the collective subconscious, a different dimension, a sense of the universe as irreducibly vast.

Gogol - locus of resistance

Hemingway, the other locus of resistance, would appear to be another follower of the Chekhov story, but Hemingway, it seems to me, was really uncomfortable working under Chekhov’s influence. Famously, he flattened and truncated the literary language of the short story, producing something closer to newsroom teletype. But that’s kind of a cosmetic change, the stronger deviation had to do with perspective. I was very surprised, rereading Hemingway stories, to see how dialogue-driven they are, how often he stripped all the narration to the bare minimum. His stories are akin to Henry Green’s, and Green’s mania, especially late in his career, to, as much as possible, write only dialogue, to use narration really only to identify speakers and to place them in the world – out of a belief that it’s impossible to know anybody else and if one is to deal in truth one cannot go farther than to document behavior. The tool that most readily reflects Hemingway and Green’s view of the short story is of course the camera or the tape recorder and that becomes an ideal – a story like ‘The Killers’ or ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ seems to have been written by a camera, the famous Hemingway mystery comes from the fact that there’s a secret at the heart of the story, which is never directly uttered, and the story acts like a camera recording extraneous, surface behavior. For instance, here’s Isaac Babel, Hemingway’s counterpart, writing about a pogrom: “Up ahead, on the corner of Rybnaya Street, thugs were smashing our store and tossing boxes of nails and machinery out onto the street, along with the new portrait photograph of me in my school uniform.” There’s no sentiment, no morality, and, as much as possible, no narration. The analogy is always to the photograph (or, as in the writing of James Salter, who modeled himself after Babel, to the film camera). This may seem analogous to Chekhov and his detached eye but Babel in particular seems to be reaching back beyond Chekhov to Turgenev, to a version of the short story before its late 19th century codification, when it was still a bit ragged and formless. Turgenev’s ‘sketches’ are ambulatory, whimsical, envisioned as a sketch in a hunter’s notebook. Babel’s and Hemingway’s, similarly, are meant to be fragments and snapshots, windows onto a large, chaotic world.

Topless Hemingway - from Vintage News Daily’s compendium of topless authors

There’s a certain ideological certitude to the short story as developed by Hemingway and Babel, a feeling that literature must follow the progress of society and history. If history has come to be fast-paced and technological, then literature must keep up – while the kind of walled garden of the Chekhov story is left behind. And I sense in both writers a certain dissatisfaction and annoyance, a feeling that the Chekhov story should have been completely supplanted but, curiously enough, isn’t going away. There’s an overpowering note of self-deprecation in Hemingway, which doesn’t at all match his macho image and, for me, connects to this dynamic within the short story. ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ is, a bit like Kafka’s ‘Eleven Sons,’ an itinerary of all the short stories Hemingway never managed to write – most of them connect to his war experience, they come out of the cauldron of history and of the present time, he imagines himself as a writer able to write all of the stories in his head, able to capture the whole world around him, very much like a roving photojournalist spraying images of everything he comes across. And, when Hemingway’s stand-in is about to die and sees the ‘white square top of Kilimanjaro,’ it’s a kind of retreat from the vision of the writer as the free-ranging roving eye back to what Hemingway really dreads, Chekhov’s poignance.

The Hemingway/Babel schism seems to lose its vigor – it so easily becomes a parody of itself, in a writer like Raymond Carver – and collapses back into the Chekhov short story. And, reading over contemporary short stories, and learning from experience as I work on my own, there’s a feeling that Chekhov has won. The fables are their own separate domain, but the analogy to photography or film or a sketchbook – which seems so intellectually intuitive – just isn’t as strong as it should be. What keeps working is Chekhov’s peculiar, clinical magic – the detached observer, the wry tenderness, the mirroring of some underlying sociological truth, the rattling along of the story until the very last line when it all comes together. (The most recent short story to get any kind of public traction, Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’ – the only one in memory to garner a ‘mainstream’ audience – is exactly that, quintessentially Chekhovian.) If there is any kind of rebellion, or room for novelty, it seems to be in the margins of Chekhov or, better to say, in a return to Chekhov’s core.

In theater, Annie Baker engineered the most effective aesthetic transformation in decades by explicitly modeling herself on Chekhov, by returning to the essence, which was Chekhov’s sense of quiet, the long pauses, the non-sequiturs that inadvertently revealed the inner life of the character, while ignoring the sociological apparatus, the drawing rooms, the middle-class ennui. My sense is that there are comparable lessons to be learned from Chekhov’s short stories. Reading Chekhov’s stories, I’m surprised by a couple of things – in what’s actually there as opposed to what’s become ‘Chekhovian.’ There are the philosophical digressions and there are the jumps in time. Chekhov’s narration isn’t actually such a fixed, unblinking observation as, say, in an imitator like Katherine Mansfield. There are the famous sections in which he imagines how this world will look from the perspective of a hundred or thousand years in the future, the feeling of the aperture being open very wide actually and allowing in all sorts of speculation. (Milan Kundera strikes me as a similar writer in this respect.) And then there is the movement through time, which seems, oddly, to have fallen completely out of the canonical short story. In thrall, probably, to Poe, the ‘Chekhovian’ short story seems to have an enforced unity. Characters get together, there’s a quotidian scene in which nothing much seems to happen except the protagonist’s world is shattered. The story finishes staring down a dusty road or – as in Alice Munro – “looking out from her kitchen window at the cold lake.”

The actual Chekhov story is very different. It’s more like a chronicle. In ‘The Lady With The Dog,’ which is the masterpiece of masterpieces, probably the perfect story, a surprisingly long period of time is covered, really the whole arc of the characters’ adult lives, with only a few telling details from each phase. There is no prejudice towards the ‘telling detail,’ towards showing rather than telling, as the writing teachers would enjoin. The perspective, actually, is sweeping and philosophical: “And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

In the late 1970s, Ann Beattie started writing what John Updike called “an entirely different kind of short story.” They were formless, reflexive – ‘just like life.’ The main point, for me, is that they seemed to come from an impulse, as opposed to, in the normal ‘Chekhov’ story, a full-fledged idea. They were shapeless in the way that Chekhov’s actual stories tended to be, bounced around in time, they seemed to be rooted in an edgy boredom. And the same for Mary Gaitskill, who, a decade later, took Beattie’s story and brought it to a new pitch of intensity. Between the two of them, those writers, to me, represent the direction the short story should take – grab a glimpse of life, it doesn’t matter what it is, and see where it leads, let it take any shape it wishes. Play with time seems to have been left out of the modern short story – and two of the best short stories ever written, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ and Robert Coover’s ‘Going For A Beer’ are essentially just tricks for exploiting the short story’s capacity to suddenly speed up or slow down time. All of these strike me as directions to take, chords to play, a path out (and some path does have to be discovered) from the short story’s amberification in the MFA workshop.