The long and the short of it - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

I have chosen a title with a familiar ring to it not merely out of facility and because length is perhaps the most significant feature in short story definitions but also in order to repeat (in part) the title (or some segment) of earlier discussions of the short story. I am thinking of Herbert Gold's "The Novel and the Story: the Long and Short of It," for example; of Mary Louise Pratt's interesting "The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It"; and of Susan Lohafer who, in her splendid Coming to Terms with the Short Story, considers "the long and the short of prose fiction" (13). Besides, my repetitious title is emblematic of the repetitions found in a good number of essays on the topic, consisting of comparisons between short fiction and the novel, for instance; of complaints about the unjust lack of regard for even great exemplars of the former in comparison with a concentration on long fiction, poetry, or drama; of laments (which sound increasingly less persuasive) on the paucity of "serious" or "theoretical" criticism devoted to the short story; of claims of the latter's resistance to (illuminating) definitions (similar claims can, of course, be made about the service encounter, the conversation, the essay, the poem, or even the novel); and of attempts to define it, nonetheless, in terms of at least some of the features I will use for my own definition (see, among others Clare Hanson, Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, Charles E. May, Allan Pasco, and Valerie Shaw).

In order to belong to the class of short stories, a text must be short: not long (War and Peace, say, Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past), not medium (The Stranger, Strait Is the Gate), and not, as Poe himself pointed out, very short. "Undue brevity," Poe noted, "is just as exceptionable |in the short: story~ as in the poem," where it "degenerates into epigrammatism" and fails to produce "an intense and enduring impression" (47-48). A minimal story like "Mary was very happy, then she lost a lot of money, and she became very sad" does not quite a short story make; neither does the anecdote by Enrique Anderson Imbert called "Taboo," which uses just thirty-one words in the original Spanish version;(1) and, more generally, neither does any text that can be read in less time than it takes to sit down. Furthermore, and regardless of its degree of narrativity (regardless of how narrative it is), the text must satisfy not simply the requirements of narrativehood (represent one or more events) but the requirements of storyhood (represent a series of situations and events involving anthropomorphic beings such that at least one nonlinguistically bound transformational relation obtains between an earlier situation and a later one). At least some of these situations and events must be fictional (they have never had any empirical existence: their meaning and force depend on a feigned context). At any rate, their historical veracity, their factual truth, is not relevant to their significance. The text must also be written and it must be written in prose (as opposed to verse rather than to poetry). It must be "literary"; offered for "display"; intended or taken to be beautiful, pleasing, aesthetically affecting (I stress, in passing, that just as not every story is a fiction and vice versa, not every fiction is literary: think of grammatical examples or philosophical suppositions). Finally, the text must be autonomous. It must not (primarily) depend for its import on another text in which it is embedded or with which it is conjoined or alternating and it must not have as its (primary) purpose the illumination of such a text.

Whatever its ultimate worth, this relatively standard definition would allow us to distinguish the short-story genre from a multiplicity of other (more-or-less related) genres: tragedy, the essay, the sonnet, but also verse narratives, so-called natural narratives, myths, jokes, anecdotes, or news stories, novels, short novels, annals, long stories, scientific reports, plot summaries, and so on and so forth. Besides, some of the defining features have certain (probable) consequences that make them more instructive than they might seem. Storyhood, for instance, implies at least some interest in the links between temporally distinct states of affairs, in the way some things come to be rather than in the way they are. And brevity is quite rich in implications. It suggests, for example, that the text will be unable linguistically to "show" (as opposed to "tell") extended periods of time; that it will not exploit the play in reading of forgetfulness and remembrance; that it will lead to a greater preoccupation with the end (an unfinished short story--like an unfinished mystery story--is quite different in its incompletion from an unfinished lyric or an unfinished novel); that it will tend to avoid such narrative features and devices as subplots, repetitive narration, and multiple embedding or alternation; and that it will favor a balanced conflictual situation (a balanced energetic structure through which protagonist and antagonist are fairly well matched, characters and the obstacles they face are equitably weighted) rather than situations where the disparities between opponents or between character and obstacle are such that--as Thomas Pavel has argued--they entail iterative or episodic arrangements. Finally, this definition will allow me to raise a number of points about genre, a topic to which I would like to devote much of what follows.

Note, first, that I arrived at my definition inductively, making sure that it would be adequate to a very great number of texts commonly viewed as short stories while it would exclude other closely related texts not always considered to be short stories and not striking me as such. The definition isolates and characterizes a class of texts which can be said to be the historical correlate of a theoretical textual class, one bearing no label and established in a purely deductive manner as the set of all and only those possible texts exhibiting--from among an indefinitely large number of possible (thematic, technical, modal, pragmatic) features--the seven features I specified Both classes--the historical one and the theoretical one--are, of course, subsumable under a certain number of (historical or theoretical) classes and both themselves subsume a certain number of classes. The class of short stories is a proper subset of the class of short texts, for instance, or the class of narrative texts, the class of written texts, the class of written narrative texts, and so on. And it subsumes any class of texts exhibiting the seven features mentioned plus at least one other feature: for example, the class of short stories in the first person, that of short stories in the second person, and that of fantastic short stories in the third person.

Note also that each of the seven features is necessary but not sufficient (as opposed to features that would be both necessary and sufficient, like the feature "narrative" for the class of narrative texts, or to features that would be sufficient but not necessary, like that same feature "narrative" for the class of texts). Moreover, each feature is given equal weight in the definition. Other classes might specify the same seven features and only those seven features but weight them differently, making some features obligatory and others optional or simply making some of them less central or important than others. For instance, there have been definitions and discussions of the short-story genre that put more emphasis on the feature "short" than on features like "autonomous" or "prose" (and that include in the set of short stories such texts as the parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of Ruth and that of Judith, and the tales of Chaucer). Similarly, and more generally, two different weights given to the feature "story" might characterize the two great sets into which the genre is often subdivided: anecdotal short stories a la Poe, epiphanic short stories a la Chekhov.

Finally, note that the seven features are formally simple (they involve no conjunctions or disjunctions, for example, in contrast to features like "oral or written" or "in verse and prose"); that they belong to heterogeneous domains (one feature refers to what is represented; another one focuses on dimension; and another one still pertains to the medium of representation); that they make up an internally consistent set (whereas lack of consistency might be called for in characterizations of postmodern fiction and potentially contradictory features--such as "use of technical jargon" and "high legibility"--sometimes cooccur in definitions of realist novels); and that they differ as to their precision or their absoluteness. The feature "short," for instance, is fuzzy (five-hundred words or fifteen thousand?) whereas the feature "written" is not; and, like "literary" but again unlike "written," "short" is in the "eye" of the beholder. Thus, the same seven-term definition can yield different short-story sets for different readers. You may think that Heart of Darkness is a short story and I may not.

In the matter of features relied upon and conjugated (their limited number, heterogeneity, formal simplicity, or nonhierarchical articulation), the definition of the short story I have proposed is similar to many other generic definitions. Genres have historically been characterized in terms of a motley, modest, and more-or-less constraining collection of features, and (as terminology more than suggests: types, modes, forms, fundamental categories, subtraditions, etc.) the set of genres itself is a collection of criterially varied and loosely defined subsets: some favor the represented (novel and romance) whereas some privilege the representing (diary novel and memoir novel); some stress mode (epic, lyric, dramatic); others focus on motivation (marvelous, fantastic, realistic) or emphasize motifs (fox stories, dog stories, detective stories); and still others foreground relations between various worlds in the textual universe, degrees of legibility, spatiotemporal origins, or effects on the receiver.

Nor is my definition less (or more!) useful than many others. Granted, it does not go very far and favors the external rather than the internal, saying little--if anything--about subjects addressed, themes developed, techniques adopted, reactions evoked. To speak--like Norman Friedman--in Aristotelian terms, though my definition characterizes the material cause ("written in prose") and, to some extent, the formal cause ("fictional story") of short stories, it hardly touches upon their efficient and final causes (most, if not all, styles and narrative devices can be used and most, if not all, responses can be expected or elicited). Indeed, given the five major areas of textual study--description (of the object studied), explanation (of how the relevant object is or comes to be), interpretation (of what it means), function, and evaluation--the definition proves useful mainly with regard to the first one (it does constitute a guide for readers and writers, buyers and sellers, encyclopedias, libraries, and taxonomies of many kinds). If, as I mentioned earlier in passing, it does suggest certain probable features of short stories, it does no more than suggest them, and it cannot be said to characterize in any significant way what can or cannot obtain in a pertinent item or to specify in any binding manner the proper conditions for the felicitous communication of that item.

This limited usefulness is endemic to generic definitions. In fact, it follows both from the nature of genres and from the nature of texts. On the one hand, genre is a configuration or entity mediating between the general and the particular, code and message, langue and parole, discourse and text, at various levels of abstraction, of course (compare poem and sonnet or narrative and epic), but usually with a privileging of the first term instead of the second. Because it helps to specify a text's appurtenance to the general (to a certain level of generality, to a certain textual family) rather than the text's constitution and concretization of a particular, genre tends to neglect individuals for collectivities, the unique for the commonplace, singularity for typicality. On the other hand, as some of my comments have already indicated, a text belongs not to one and only one genre or textual family but (most often) to an indefinitely large number of textual families, including at least one family of which it is the sole member. It concretizes not one and only one cluster of features but (most often) an indefinitely large set of such clusters, including the cluster of all the features that make it what it is. To give the mere beginning of two examples, Pliny the Younger writes texts that he calls "hendecasyllables" but recognizes (in a letter to Paternus) that others might call them "epigrams," "idylls," "eclogues," or "poems" (Schaeffer 128); and Maupassant's "Le Horla" is not only a short story but also a vampire story, an illustration of the fantastic, and an instance of diary fiction. In other words, given the long and the short of genre and text, the long and the short of it is pretty much bound to be short.

Note

1 The English version uses thirty-two words: "His guardian angel whispered to Fabian, behind his shoulder: 'Careful, Fabian! It is decreed that you will die the minute you pronounce the word doyen.' 'Doyen?' asks Fabian, intrigued. And he dies" (Gerlach 76).

Works Cited

Friedman, Norman. "Recent Short Story Theories: Problems in Definition." Lohafer and Clarey 13-31.

Gerlach, John. "The Margins of Narrative: The Very Short Story, the Prose Poem, and the Lyric." Lohafer and Clarey 74-84.

Gold, Herbert. "The Novel and the Story: the Long and Short of It." Fiction of the Fifties. Ed. Herbert Gold. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959. 12-15.

Hanson, Clare, ed. Re-reading the Short Story. New York St. Martin's, 1989.

Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.

-----, and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

May, Charles E., ed. Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976.

Pasco, Allan H. "On Defining Short Stories." New Literary History 22 (1991): 407-22.

Pavel, Thomas. "Le deploiement de l'intrigue." Poetique 64 (1985): 455-61.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "Rev. of Twice-Told Tales," by Nathaniel Hawthorne. May 45-51.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It." Poetics 10 (1981): 175-94.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Qu'est-ce qu'un genre litteraire? Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983.

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