Re-reading the Short Story

145 Pages·1989·14.179 MB·English

by  Clare Hanson (eds.)

RE-READING THE SHORT STORY
Also by Clare Hanson
KATHERINE MANSFIELD (with Andrew Gurr)
SHORT STORIES AND SHORT FICTIONS, 1880--1980
THE CRITICAL WRITINGS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD (editor)
Re-reading the Short
Story
Edited by
CLARE HANSON
Senior Lecturer in English
College of St Paul and StMary, Cheltenham
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-10315-7 ISBN 978-1-349-10313-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10313-3
© Clare Hanson, 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46814-2
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-02398-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Re-reading the short story.
Includes bibliographies.
1. Short story--Congresses. 2. Short stories,
English-History and criticism--Congresses.
3. Short stories, American-History and criticism
Congresses. I. Hanson, Clare.
PN3373.R5 1989 809.3'1 88-18402
ISBN 978-0-312-02398-0
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Text and Affect: A Model of Story Understanding 10
David Miall
3 'Things out of Words': Towards a Poetics of Short
Fiction 22
Clare Hanson
4 Too Short for a Book? 34
Nicole Ward Jouve
5 Time and the Short Story 45
Jean Pickering
6 Gender and Genre 55
Mary Eagleton
7 Johnny Panic and the Pleasures of Disruption 69
Robert Hampson
8 High Ground 86
Nicola Bradbury
9 Hemingway and Fitzgerald: Two Short Stories 98
Lionel Kelly
10 Genre Reversals in Doris Lessing: Stories Like Novels
and Novels Like Stories 110
Claire Sprague
11 Crystals, Fragments and Golden Wholes: Short Stories
in The Golden Notebook 126
Ellen Cronan Rose
v
Notes on the Contributors
Nicola Bradbury is Lecturer in English at the University of
Reading. Her publications include Henry James: The Later Novels
(1979) and A Select Bibliography of Henry James (1986).
Mary Eagleton lectures in Literature at the College of Ripon and
York StJohn. She has been closely involved in the development
of Women's Studies and is the editor of Feminist Literary Theory:
A Reader (1986).
Robert Hampson is Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway and
Bedford New College, University of London.
Clare Hanson is Lecturer in English at the College of St Paul and
St Mary, Cheltenham. Her publications include Short Stories and
Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (1985) and, as editor, The Critical Writings
of Katherine Mansfield (1987).
Nicole Ward Jouve is Reader in English at the University of
York. She is the author of two novels, Le Spectre du Gris
(translated by herself as Shades of Grey, 1981) and L'Entremise
(1980). She is the author too of a critical work on Baudelaire, A
Fire to Conquer Darkness (1980). She has written numerous articles,
especially on women's writing, and has recently published a
study of the Yorkshire Ripper (The Streetcleaner: The Yorkshire
Ripper on Trial, 1986). She has also published a book on Colette
(1987).
Lionel Kelly teaches English at the University of Reading. His
special interests are 18th-century and modern English literature,
and 20th-century American literature. He is the editor of Tobias
Smollett in the Routledge Critical Heritage series, and of Richard
Aldington, Papers from the Reading Conference.
David Miall is Senior Lecturer in English at the College of St
Paul and StMary, Cheltenham. He is the author of many articles
on literary theory and hermeneutics, contributing to the British
Journal of Psychology as well as to specialist literary journals.
vii
viii Notes on the Contributors
Jean Pickering is Professor of English at California State
University, Fresno. Apart from publishing her own short stories,
she has contributed to G. K. Hall & Co's forthcoming seven
volume history of the short story, and has written on English
women writers, including Vera Brittain and Margaret Drabble.
Ellen Cronan Rose is Associate Professor of English at Drexel
University, Philadelphia. Her publications include Margaret Drabble:
Equivocal Figures (1980) and several essays on Doris Lessing. She is
currently preparing a handbook on The Golden Notebook for the
Modern Language Association.
Claire Sprague is Visiting Professor of English at New York
University. She is the editor of Twentieth Century Views: Virginia
Woolf (1971) and, with Virginia Tiger, of Critical Essays on Doris
Lessing (1986). She has recently published a critical study, Rereading
Doris Lessing (1987) and is the editor of the Doris Lessing Newsletter.
1
Introduction
CLARE HANSON
For a complex of reasons the short story has been largely excluded
from the arena of contemporary critical debate: this collection of
essays aims to re-establish the short story as a legitimate subject
for discussion. Each of the essays was first presented at a Sympo
sium on the Short Story held at the College of St Paul and St Mary,
Cheltenham, in September 1986. The idea for the symposium came
from a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the current level of
debate on the short story form. Some of the contributors had
previously worked on the short story, and all shared a sense that
a unique area of literary activity was being neglected in critical
terms- and this, paradoxically, at a time when it seemed that the
short story would prove a particularly fruitful area of study in the
light of recent developments in literary theory. In this intro
duction I have attempted to chart some of the reasons for
this paradoxical situation. It caused mixed feelings of exhilaration
and frustration for the contributors to this collection: exhilaration
at working on such an untouched area; frustration at seeing a wide
communication gap and feeling a need to persuade others of the
importance of a field which was becoming almost ghettoised. The
publication of these essays is a step towards bridging this gap,
making for necessary communication.
Why has the short story been neglected, in both academic and
non-academic critical circles? It is a form, after all, which is
immensely popular with readers, and, perhaps more importantly,
with writers. Doris Lessing, for example, confesses, as Ellen Rose
points out in her essay in this collection, to an 'addiction' to the
short story form. Does the problem lie in the fact that the short
story is not quite respectable as an art form precisely because it is
'popular' in the pejorative sense? It took a long while for the novel
to establish itself as a 'serious' art form: the short story-a relatively
recent form- is still struggling. Also, the phenomenal success of
the 'woman's short story' in the weekly magazines- comparable
1
2 Introduction
to the success of Mills and Boon fiction - has undoubtedly helped
to fix the form as popular and I or inferior in the minds of
literary critics. Because of the economic difficulties of short story
publishing, even the more serious new writers, Tama Janowitz
for example, appear not only in the prestigious New Yorker but in
the more humdrum British Woman's Journal: so in the late 20th
century the short story form is still tied to the magazine outlet and
to a potentially disabling publishing context.
Over the last ten years a handful of academic books have
grappled with the thorny question of short story theory.1 However,
the best theory and criticism of the short story form has come from
practising writers: Frank O'Connor, for example, in his pioneering
study The Lonely Voice (1963); Eudora Welty in her subtle and oblique
The Eye of the Story (1978). Nadine Gordimer, too, contributing to
the 1968 Kenyon Review 'International Symposium on the Short
Story' has pointed suggestively to the special possibilities of the
short story form:
Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character
only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about
with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his
characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency
of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does
not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like
the flash of fire-flies, in and out, now here, now there, in
darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs
is the art of the only thing one can be sure of - the present
moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation
of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. 2
A further point suggests itself. Is it not the case that the short
story is or has been notably a form of the margins, a form which
is in some sense ex-centric, not part of official or 'high' cultural
hegemony? If by literary form itself we mean the expectations
which we as readers bring to a genre, then the form of the short
story has lent itself to the presentation of the partial, the incomplete,
that which cannot be, as Nadine Gordimer suggests, entirely
satisfactorily organised or 'explained'. The short story has offered
itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks - writers who for
one reason or another have not been part of the ruling 'narrative'
or epistemological I experiential framework of their society. So