NOTE 1: READING LITERARY WORKS
The Short Story
1. Everyone has a short story to tell though may be reluctant to tell it in public. Many people tell a funny story at a dinner party or thrilling tale at a family gathering. The listeners' eyes roll as they laugh or groan. The tradition of story telling is part of the oral history of every culture and dates back to ancient times. The oral tradition is usually anecdotal and illustrative in nature. It often a vignette covering a short period of time and has a moral ending. The didactic element continues to motive a lot of modern short stories which are written in form.
2. The didactic tales of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Tatler and The Spectator in the eighteenth century do not attempt to convince the reader but to appeal to his sense of right and wrong. Usually a short story is read in one sitting and is between 5 to 20 pages long. A short story is usually a prose fiction that introduces a narrative situation or a problem and sets out to resolve it such as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." A short story can also depict a mood or an atmosphere such as Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov may be considered as the two important initiators of the modern short story.
3. In the United States of America, Nathaniel Hawthorne's book Twice-Told Tales published in 1837 (and Edgar Allan Poe's widely read review of it for Graham's Magazine in 1842) laid the foundation of the short story. Poe was quick to understand the potential of the short story and rated it higher than the essay and the poem. He wrote:
We have always regarded the Tale as affording the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent. It has peculiar advantages, which the novel does not admit. It is, of course, a far finer field than the essay. It has even points of superiority over the poem.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an explosion of pulp magazines such as Argosy, Shriek!, The Literary Digest, The All-Story. They all needed short fiction to fill their weekly or monthly pages. The short story fulfilled the need for cheap entertainment prompting Poe to call the short story the child of the American magazine.. Slick magazines like Collier's, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post also serialized the novel but their price and contents were geared towards the middle- and upper-class readers. The plots were geared to generate suspense for readers who were always eager to know what was going to happen in the next installment. A lot of these installment stories are largely forgotten, but the short story has survived. A short story packs a lot of stuff and as such requires much more from its audience as it does from its writer.
NOTE 2: READING LITERARY WORKS
The Short Story
1. The power of the short story has been ably demonstrated by writers such as Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty, Dorothy Parker, O. Henry, Toshio Mori, Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates, Anzia Yezierska, Bharati Mukherjee, Hisaye Yamamoto, Jhumpa Laihiri and John Cheever. It is possible to see the simple but terse style of Ernest Hemingway in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or the inhuman suspense of Shirley Jackson in "The Lottery." In 1966 Katherine Anne Porter won a Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories that exhibited an extraordinary control of form and style. Flannery O'Connor introduced a brutal comedy with a violent tragedy in her twin short story collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her grotesque sensibility gave a new force to the short story. Raymond Carver introduced a sharp, penetrating insight into his stories turning ordinary events of daily life into extraordinary ones.
2. Daniel Halpern observes that short story writers born in the early 20th century were greatly influenced by Anton Chekhov, while younger writers find popular culture inescapable. Moody worries about the impact of the media on writers. He states:
I don't really think this density of media is a bad thing although I certainly believe that writers should be readers. Otherwise language, which is the engine of literature, suffers.
3. Most short stories in the 1930's 50's and 80's were quite realistic and worked within a conservative frame of reference to retain their popularity. Writing in Harper's (August 1999) Vince Passaro writes:
"Today's American short fiction is more various, more successfully experimental, more urbane, funnier and more bitingly ironic than that written in the Hemingway tradition."
Contemporary short fiction increasingly takes recourse to cultural references and innuendoes that make it more engaging to the reader. If the novel can be seen as a movie then the short story may be seen as a snapshot well suited to the short attention span of the modern reader.
NOTE 3: READING LITERARY WORKS
The Short Story
1. More and more, short storywriters impact upon the reader's sensibility and not on his aspirations. Melissa Bank the author if the short story collection The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing has this to say about the modern short story writer: "I do think that twenty years ago, Carver made writers want to write great short stories—like his. You'd read one of his stories and think, I want to do that.... Now I might be reading a story by Lorrie Moore and think, That's the funniest line I ever heard. The great short fiction today has more of a collective power of inspiring writers to find what belongs to them." Negotiating the contemporary reality, the short story now partakes of the realist, minimalist and postmodernist traditions and different trans-cultural and global changes.
2. At the turn of the twentieth century many mainstream magazines published literary fiction. Things have changed. It is now hard to believe that Mademoiselle once published William Faulkner; or Playboy published Philip Roth. Cosmo readers would be pleasantly surprised to find short stories by David Foster Wallace or Jhumpa Lahiri replacing some article about how to please men or apply a new shade of lipstick. "As the commercial slick short story has largely died out," says Lorrie Moore, author of The Collection Birds of America, "the stories we are left with are almost all serious art." Through the short story has become sharper and focussed there are few mainstream magazines to publish it. It is rather difficult to find replacements for the good old publications such as Story or the Saturday Evening Post except perhaps Coppola's Zoetrope.
NOTE 4: READING LITERARY WORKS
The Short Story
1. The short story has become more highbrow catering to an elite audience making the work of writers easier. They do not have to pander to the cheap taste of a demanding audience. Larry Dark, editor of the O. Henry Awards' Prize Stories series, has this to say about the modern short story writer:
No one expects to make a living writing short stories, which I guess, creatively, makes them more free. Writers who write short stories are like poets—they're teaching or have another job.
2. In recent times a new trend of interconnecting stories within a collected publication has become fashionable. This is called a retro novel or novelization giving a commercial impetus to a collection of short stories. The best example in recent times could be Bank's collection The Girls' Guide that takes full advantage of the novel's commercial reach. Though the art of linking up stories has been practiced by writers such as Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway modern writers are suing linked stories for increasing sales. American academia could be indirectly responsible for this trend. A leading American critic Rohrberger states:
We have maybe 600 or more universities giving creative writing degrees and it's extremely difficult for students to write a novel in a couple years, so generally they write short stories. They then come to realize that if they write a series of stories related around something, they can publish them all together and perhaps people will think of them as a novel.
Halpern however disagrees with this assessment; he sees novelization as a reaction to the opportunistic nature of publishing.
NOTE 5: READING LITERARY WORKS
The Short Story
1. Some writers see this technique as an organizational tool bringing their vision together. Katrina Kenison, editor of the Best American Short Stories, sees this method as an attempt to blur the line between a short story and a novel.
A novel requires a real blueprint from the author, whereas a short story has a lot more room for spontaneity, and a whole story can arise from an image or a line or a character. The linked stories are somewhere in the middle—they feature the same character but do not follow the novel progression. They pick up at different times, different situations. It's just a way of exploring characterization, narrative and plot.
2. Whatever be the reason the form of the short story is altering to suit the demands of publishing and changing readership. More and more writers are now dividing their short stories into little chapters, further breaking down the traditional form. As the short story becomes discursive it returns to the more classic form by restructuring itself in this way. This could be a return to the longer well-constructed short story that captures much more human experience than legitimately possible.
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