Introduction
Here in the year 2000 we lack a proprietary critic of the short story
as, for example, Professor Helen Vendler is a proprietary critic of
the lyric poem. Given the great story writers Chekhov, or Joyce, or
Hemingway we might wonder about this, except that Hemingway turned
to novels after In Our Time just as Joyce didafter Dubliners. Chekhov
in his maturity turned to drama. While there are exceptions Isaac
Babel or Grace Paley, for example, writers-for-life of brilliant,
tightly sprung prose designedly inhospitable to the long forms we
may say that short stories are what young writers produce on their
way to their first novels, or what older writers produce in between
novels.
The critic of fiction will hold title to all its estates, and the
novel is a major act of the culture.
Apart from that, it may be that the short story, as it has shifted
historically from the episodic tale to the compressive illumination,
can't sustain that much formal analysis. Some years ago, the late
Frank O'Connor published a study of the genre entitled The Lonely
Voice. O'Connor, himself a masterful writer of short stories, wanted
to find some means of distinguishing the form from the novella and
the
novel. His title suggests the nature of his conclusion: it is not any
particular technique of the short story that sets it apart, because
as
a selective rather than an inclusive art, it can construct itself in
an endless number of ways. Nor is its length definitive, for, as he
points out, not a few of the great examples of the genre are quite
long. What makes the short story a distinct literary form, says
O'Connor, is "its intense awareness of human loneliness."
Sprung from Gogol's seminal story "The Overcoat," in which an
impoverished clerk in winter manages to buy a warm overcoat only to
have it stolen, a disaster that drives him to his death, the modern
short story is a genre that deals with members of "submerged
population groups," excluded by one means or another from living in
the certainties of civilization people of a minority, outsiders,
marginalists, for whom society provides no place or means of
self-respect. By contrast, according to O'Connor, the fiction of the
novel assumes that man is "an animal who lives in community, as in
Jane Austen and Trollope it obviously does."
But one can think immediately of stories rising from nonsubmerged
populations, stories of people centrally located in community as
they
are in many of Katherine Mansfield's or Henry James's stories who
are
not of the alienated and marginalized, though they may come to be
from
their own actions.
Perhaps anticipating this problem, O'Connor modifies his thesis to
include in his submerged population groups people who are
notmaterially but spiritually isolated artists, dreamers, idealists,
antiheroes, visionaries, and so forth. But then who does not belong
to
a submerged population group? The lonely voice is a universal chorus,
and we are left with the not terribly useful truism that the story as
a form deals with the human condition.
Besides which, one is immediately able to cite novels not at all as
societally rooted as Austen's or Trollope's: Sartre's Nausea, for
example, or Richard Wright's Native Son, or Samuel Beckett's Molloy
trilogy, among others. These works bring their awareness of
loneliness
to a pitch that the word "intense" hardly begins to describe.
So finally O'Connor's attempt to differentiate the short story as a
genre by virtue of its sociology doesn't hold up under examination.
On the other hand, if we deny it as a thesis, we can still accept it
as an insight. We can acknowledge the tendency of the short story to
isolate the individual paradoxically, perhaps, from the technical
factors Frank O'Connor has dismissed. The story as a particular kind
of fiction may not be definable by its construction or its length,
but
what is critical is its scale. Smaller in its overall dimensions than
the novel, it is a fiction in which society is surmised as the
darkness around the narrative circle of light. In other words, the
scale of the short story predisposes it to the isolation of the self.
And the author's awareness of loneliness is the literary dignity he
grants his characters in spite of their circumstances the same
dignity or moral consequence that, according to the critic Walter
Benjamin, is granted even to the humblest person on the occasion of
his death. We can say, then, that the subjugated population of a
short
story is likely to be, before anything else, a population of one. And
whoever in a short story is deprived of the certainties of
civilization may attribute it, among other things, to the author's
concise attentions.
It was the Freudian disciple Wilhelm Reich who realized that
extensive
dream analysis was not necessary to uncover a patient's psyche:
anywhere you looked in actions taken, habits of thought, tone of
voice, body language you would find the typified self. That about
describes the working principle of the short story as practiced by
James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.
Joyce, who brought the modern short story to perfection, showed us
that its point of entry can be quite close in time to its denouement
in other words, that the story may look in on someone's life as it
just happens to reach its moment of inexorable moral definition.
Hemingway added to that the technique of composing a story whose
suspense derives from the withheld mention of its central problem.
I have read perhaps 140 stories to make this selection of 21 for the
year 2000. Here is the news: the writers of today are drifting away
from the classic model of the modern short story. They seem more
disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic, and so their stories
sometimes point to the earlier model of the tale. Stories in this
mode
tend to be longer, their points of entry can be quite distant from
their denouements, and their central problem is made quite explicit.
But if the twenty-one outstanding stories in this volume are an
indication, the art of the story hardly seems to have suffered.
Oddly,
the reader discerns a nice sense of freedom in what has to be thought
of as a conservative tendency, one that glances back to the
nineteenth
century. It's as if some literary shackle has been broken one made
of
gold, admittedly, but a shackle nevertheless.
And there is more news: although my coeditor, Katrina Kenison, and I
have functioned as plain and modest readers, going from story to
story
to find the pleasure or excitement or truth in them, and although we
have chosen them one at a time with no thought for their effect
overall or their relationship to one another, they turn out as a
collection to reflect the evolving demographics of ourliterary
republic. Their protagonists are Latino, African American, Chinese,
Israeli, Indian, Bosnian, Bengali, Hawaiian, and Trinidadian in
greater numbers than they are native white middle-class. This brings
us back again to Frank O'Connor's untenable theory but useful
insight.
I don't mean to suggest that the tones or moods or states of mind of
the stories are uniform. Humor, wonder, serenity, horror, sadness,
stoicism, and love come off these pages. Geniuses are portrayed, as
are the brutally retarded and the Alzheimer-ridden. Parables are
given, and stories echo the realism of the front page.
I think it is possible to see in this collection the universality of
theliterary conscience. You may find proof too of the vibrant,
revivified energies given to this country by its immigrant infusions.
But above all, here is the felt life conferred by the gifted
storyteller ... who always raises two voices into the lonely
universe, the character's and the writer's own.
E.L. Doctorow
Copyright (C) 2000 by E.L. Doctorow. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.