Studying the short-story E-Book

Esenwein J. Berg

• Herausgeber: PubMe
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

But the great majority of novels and plays represent human life in nothing more faithfully than in their insistence upon deeds. It is through action—tangible, visible action upon the stage, or, in the novel, action suggested by the medium of words—that the characters of the play and the novel are ordinarily revealed. In proportion as high art is attained in either medium of expression this action is marked by adequacy of motive, by conformity to the character, by progression and unity.

Leseprobe

J. Berg Esenwein

Studying the short-story

UUID: 24471521-6f3d-438e-a48c-1eead003c9f8

This ebook was created with StreetLib Writehttps://writeapp.io

Table of contents

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SHORT-STORY

I STORIES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE

II STORIES OF MYSTERY AND FANTASY

III STORIES OF EMOTION

IV HUMOROUS STORIES

V STORIES OF SETTING

VI IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES

VII CHARACTER STUDIES

VIII PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SHORT-STORY

Fiction as an art has made more progress during the last hundred years than any other literary type. The first half of the nineteenth century especially developed a consciousness of subject matter and form in both the novel and the short-story which has created an epoch as notable in the history of fiction as was the age of Shakespeare in the progress of the drama. In Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and America arose fictional artists of distinguished ability, while in other nations writers of scarcely less merit soon followed.The novel demands a special study, so even for its relation to our theme—the short-story—the reader must be referred to such works as specialize on the longer form.[1]A comprehensive treatment of the short-story would include an inquiry into the origins of all short fictional forms, for every story that is short is popularly knownas a short story. The fullest and best guide for such a study is Henry Seidel Canby’s historical and critical treatise, The Short Story in English.Naturally, an inquiry into origins would prove to be measurably profitless and certainly dry for the general student were it not supplemented by the reading of a great many stories—preferably in the original—which illustrate the steps in short-story development from earliest times.[2]A further field for a comprehensive survey would be a critical comparison of the modern form with its several ancestral and contributory forms, from original sources.A third examen would be devoted to the characteristics and tendencies of the present-day short-story as presented in volume form and, particularly, in the modern magazine.A fourth, would undertake to study the rhetoric of the form.[3]None of these sorts of study can be exhaustively presented in this volume, yet all are touched upon so suggestively and with such full references that the reader may himself pursue the themes with what fullness he elects. The special field herein covered will be, I believe, sufficiently apparent as the reader proceeds.Let it be understood from the outstart that throughout this volume the term short-story is used rather loosely to cover a wide variety of short fiction; yet presently it will be necessary to show precisely how the modern form differs from its fictive ancestors, and that distinction will assume some importance to those who care about recognizing the several short fictional forms and who enjoy calling things by their exact names.The first story-teller was that primitive man who in his wanderings afield met some strange adventure and returned to his fellows to narrate it. His narration was a true story. The first fictionist—perhaps it was the same hairy savage—was he who, having chosen to tell his adventure, also resolved to add to it some details wrought of his own fancy. That was fiction, because while the story was compounded of truth it was worked out by the aid of imagination, and so was close kin to the story born entirely of fancy which merely uses true-seeming things, or veritable contributory facts, to make the story “real.”Egyptian tales, recorded on papyrus sheets, date back six thousand years. Adventure was their theme, while gods and heroes, beasts and wonders, furnished their incidents. When love was introduced, obscenities often followed, so that the ancient tales of pure adventure are best suited to present-day reading.What is true of Egypt 4000 B. C. is equally true of Greece many centuries later. The Homeric storieswill serve as specimens of adventure narrative; and the Milesian tales furnish the erotic type.As for the literary art of these early fictions, we need only refer to ancient poetry to see how perfect was its development two thousand and more years ago; therefore—for the poets were story-tellers—we need not marvel at the majestic diction, poetic ideas, and dramatic simplicity of such short-stories as the Egyptian “Tales of the Magicians,”[4]fully six thousand years old; the Homeric legends, told possibly twenty-five hundred years ago;[5] “ The Book of Esther,”[6]written more than twenty-one hundred years ago; and the stories by Lucius Apuleius, in The Golden Ass,[7]quite two thousand years old.In form these ancient stories were of three types: the anecdote (often expanded beyond the normal limits of anecdote); the scenario, or outline of what might well have been told as a longer story; and the tale, or straightforward chain of incidents with no real complicating plot.Story-telling maintained much the same pace until the early middle ages, when the sway of religious ideas was felt in every department of life. Superstition had always vested the forces of nature with more than natural attributes, so that the wonder tale was normally the companion of the war or adventure story. But now the power of the Christian religion was laying hold upon all minds, and the French conte dévot, or miracle story, recitedthe wonderful doings of the saints in human behalf, or told how some pious mystic had encountered heavenly forces, triumphed over demons and monsters of evil, and performed prodigies of piety.These tales were loosely hung together, and exhibited none of the compression and sense of orderly climax characteristic of the short-story to-day. In style the early medieval stories fell far below classic models, naturally enough, for language was feeling the corrupting influences of that inrush of barbarian peoples which at length brought Rome to the dust, while culture was conserved only in out-of-the-way places. In form these narratives were chiefly the tale, the anecdote, and the episode, by which I mean a fragmentary part of a longer tale with which it had little or no organic connection.The conte dévot in England was even more crude, for Old English was less polished than the speech of France and its people more heroic than literary.When we come to the middle of the fourteenth century we find in two great writers a marked advancement: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron—the former superior to the latter in story-telling art—opened up rich mines of legend, adventure, humor, and human interest. All subsequent narrators modeled their tales after these patterns. Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” has many points in common with the modern short-story, and so has Boccaccio’s novella, “Rinaldo,” but these approaches to what we now recognize as the short-story type were not so much by conscious intention as by a groping after an ideal which was only dimlyexistent in their minds—so dimly, indeed, that even when once attained it seems not to have been pursued. For the most part the fabliaux[8]of Chaucer and the novelle[9]of Boccaccio were rambling, loosely knit, anecdotal, lacking in the firmly fleshed contours of the modern short-story. Even the Gesta Romanorum, or Deeds of the Romans—181 short legends and stories first printed about 1473—show the same ear marks.About the middle of the sixteenth century appeared The Arabian Nights, that magic carpet which has carried us all to the regions of breathless delight. The story of “Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves,” for one, is as near an approach to our present-day short-story as was Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and quite unsurpassed in all the literature of wonder-tales.Thus for two thousand years—yes, for six thousand years—the essentials of short story narration were unchanged. What progress had been made was toward truth-seeming, clearer characterization, and a finer human interest, yet so surpassing in these very respects are some of the ancient stories that they remain models to-day. Chiefly, then, the short fiction of the eighteenth century showed progress over that of earlier centuries in that it was much more consistently produced by amuch greater number of writers—so far as our records show.Separately interesting studies of the eighteenth-century essay-stories of Addison, Steele, Johnson and others in the English periodicals, the Spectator, Tatler, Rambler, Idler, and Guardian might well be made, for these forms lead us directly to Hawthorne and Irving in America. Of almost equal value would be a study of Defoe’s ghost stories (1727) and Voltaire’s development of the protean French detective-story, in his “Zadig,” twenty years later.With the opening of the nineteenth century the marks of progress are more decided. The first thirty years brought out a score of the most brilliant story-tellers imaginable, who differ from Poe and his followers only in this particular—they were still perfecting the tale, the sketch, the expanded anecdote, the episode, and the scenario, for they had neither for themselves nor for their literary posterity set up a new standard, as Poe was to do so very soon.Of this fecund era were born the German weird tales of Ernst Amadeus Hoffmann and J. L. Tieck; the Moral Tales of Maria Edgeworth, and the fictional episodes of Sir Walter Scott in Scotland; the anecdotal tales and the novelettes of Prosper Mérimée and Charles Nodier in France; the tales of Pushkin, the father of Russian literature; and the tale-short-stories of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in America. Here too lies a fascinating field of study, over which to trace the approach towards that final form, so to call it, whichwas both demonstrated and expounded by Poe. It must suffice here to observe that Irving preferred the easy-flowing essay-sketch, and the delightful, leisurely tale (with certain well-marked tendencies toward a compact plot), rather than the closely organized plot which we nowadays recognize as the special possession of the short-story.In France, from 1830 to 1832, Honoré de Balzac produced a series of notable short-stories which, while marvels of narration, tend to be condensed novels in plot, novelettes in length, or expanded anecdotes. However, together with the stories of Prosper Mérimée, they furnish evidence for a tolerably strong claim that the modern short-story was developed as a fixed form in France before it was discovered in America—a claim, however, which lacks the elements of entire solidity, as a more critical study would show.From 1830 on, it would require a catalogue to name, and volumes to discuss, the array of European and American writers who have produced fictional narratives which have more or less closely approached the short-story form. Until 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote “Berenice” and “The Assignation,” the approaches to the present form were sporadic and unsustained and even unconscious, so far as we may argue from the absence of any critical standard. After that year both Poe and others seemed to strive more definitely for the close plot, the repression of detail, the measurable unity of action, and the singleness of effect which Poe clearly defined and expounded in 1842.Since Poe’s notable pronouncement, the place of the short-story as a distinctive literary form has been attested by the rise and growth of a body of criticism, in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, volumes given broadly to the consideration of fiction, and books devoted entirely to the short-story. Many of these contributions to the literature of criticism are particularly important because their authors were the first to announce conclusions regarding the form which have since been accepted as standard; others have traced with a nice sense of comparison the origin and development of those earlier forms of story-telling which marked the more or less definite stages of progress toward the short-story type as at present recognized; while still others are valuable as characterizing effectively the stories of well-known writers and comparing the progress which each showed as the short-story moved on toward its present high place.Some detailed mention of these writings, among other critical and historical productions, may be of value here, without at all attempting a bibliography, but merely naming chronologically the work of those critics who have developed one or more phases of the subject with particular effectiveness.[10]Interesting and informing as all such historical and comparative research work certainly is, it must proveto be of greater value to the student than to the fiction writer. True, the latter may profit by a profound knowledge of critical distinctions, but he is more likely, for a time at least, to find his freedom embarrassed by attempting to adhere too closely to form, whereas in fiction a chief virtue is that spontaneity which expresses itself.But there would seem to be some safe middle-ground between a flouting of all canons of art, arising from an utter ignorance and contempt of the history of any artistic form, and a timid and tied-up unwillingness to do anything in fiction without first inquiring, “Am I obeying the laws as set forth by the critics?” The short-story writer should be no less unhampered because he has learned the origin and traced the growth of the ancient fiction-forms and learned to say of his own work, or that of others, “Here is a fictional sketch, here a tale, and here a short-story”—if, indeed, he does not recognize in it a delightful hybrid.By far the most important contribution to the subject of short-story criticism was made by Edgar Allan Poe, when in May, 1842, he published in Graham’s Magazine a review of Hawthorne’s Tales, in which he announced his theory of the short-story—a theory which is regarded to-day as the soundest of any yet laid down.In 1876, Friedrich Spielhagen pointed out in his Novelle oder Roman the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story.[11]In 1884, Professor Brander Matthews published in the Saturday Review, London, and in 1885 published in Lippincott’s Magazine, “The Philosophy of the Short-story,” in which, independently of Spielhagen, he announced the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story, and pointed out its peculiarly individual characteristics. In a later book-edition, he added greatly to the original essay by a series of quotations from other critics and essayists, and many original comparisons between the writings of master short-story tellers.In March 11, 1892, T. W. Higginson contributed to The Independent an article on “The Local Short-Story,” which was the first known discussion of that important type.In 1895, Sherwin Cody published anonymously in London the first technical treatise on the rhetoric of the short-story, “The Art of Story Writing.”In 1896, Professor E. H. Lewis instituted in Chicago University the first course of instruction in the art of story-writing.In 1898, Charles Raymond Barrett published the first large work on Short Story Writing, with a complete analysis of Hawthorne’s “The Ambitious Guest,” and many important suggestions for writers.In the same year Charity Dye first applied pedagogical principles to the study of the short story, in The Story-Teller’s Art.In 1902, Professor Lewis W. Smith published a brochure, The Writing of the Short Story, in which psychologicalprinciples were for the first time applied to the study and the writing of the short-story.In 1902, Professor H. S. Canby issued The Short Story, in which the theory of impressionism was for the first time developed. In 1903, this essay was included in The Book of the Short Story, Alexander Jessup collaborating, together with specimens of stories from the earliest times and lists of tales and short-stories arranged by periods.In 1904, Professor Charles S. Baldwin developed a criticism of American Short Stories which has been largely followed by later writers.In 1909, Professor H. S. Canby produced The Short Story in English, the first voluminous historical and critical study of the origins, forms, and content of the short-story.I have dwelt upon the history of the short-story thus in outline because we often meet the inquiry—sometimes put ignorantly, sometimes skeptically—What is a short-story? Is it anything more than a story that is short?The passion for naming and classifying all classes of literature may easily run to extreme, and yet there are some very great values to be secured by both the reader and the writer in arriving at some understanding of what literary terms mean. To establish distinctions among short fictive forms is by no means to assert that types which differ from the technical short-story are therefore of a lower order of merit. Many specimens of cognate forms possess an interest which surpasses that of short-stories typically perfect.Ever since Poe differentiated the short-story from the mere short narrative we have come to a clearer apprehension of what this form really means. I suppose that no one would insist upon the standards of the short-story as being the criterion of merit for short fiction—certainly I should commit no such folly in attempting to establish an understanding, not to say a definition, of the form. More than that: some short-stories which in one or more points come short of technical perfection doubtless possess a human interest and a charm quite lacking in others which are technically perfect—just as may be the case with pictures.Some things, however, the little fiction must contain to come technically within the class of perfect short-stories. It must be centralized about one predominating incident—which may be supported by various minor incidents. This incident must intimately concern one central character—and other supporting characters, it may be. The story must move with a certain degree of directness—that is, there must be a thorough exclusion of such detail as is needless. This central situation or episode or incident constitutes, in its working out, the plot; for the plot must not only have a crisis growing out of a tie-up or crossroads or complication, but the very essence of the plot will consist in the resolution or untying or denouement of the complication.Naturally, the word plot will suggest to many a high degree of complexity; but this is by no means necessary in order to establish the claims of a fictitious narrative to being a short-story. Indeed, some of the best short-storiesare based upon a very slender complication; in other words, their plots are not complex.Elsewhere[12]I have defined the short-story, and this statement may serve to crystallize the foregoing. “A short-story is a brief, imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character; it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment so organized, as to produce a single impression.”But some of these points need to be amplified.A short-story is brief not merely from the fact that it contains comparatively few words, but in that it is so compressed as to omit non-essential elements. It must be the narration of a single incident, supported, it may be, by other incidents, but none of these minor incidents must rival the central incident in the interest of the reader. A single character must be preëminent, but a pair of characters coördinate in importance may enjoy this single preëminence in the story, yet no minor characters must come to overshadow the central figure. The story will be imaginative, not in the sense that it must be imaginary, or that the facts in the story may not be real facts, but they must be handled and organized in an imaginative way, else it would be plain fact and not fiction. The story must contain a plot; that is to say, it must exhibit a character or several characters in crisis—for in plot the important word is crisis—and the denouement is the resolution of this crisis. Finally, the whole must be so organized as to leave a unified impressionupon the mind of the reader—it must concentrate and not diffuse attention and interest.All of the same qualities that inhere in the short-story may also be found in the novelette, except that the novelette lacks the compression, unity and simplicity of the short-story and is therefore really a short novel. Both the novel and the novelette admit of sub-plots, a large number of minor incidents, and even of digressions, whereas these are denied to the short-story, which throws a white light on a single crucial instance of life, some character in its hour of crisis, some soul at the crossroads of destiny.There is a tendency nowadays to give a mere outline of a story—so to condense it, so to make it swift, that the narration amounts to merely an outline without the flesh and blood of the true short-story. In other words, there is a tendency to call a scenario of a much longer story—for instance the outline of a novelette—a short-story. This extreme is as remote from the well-rounded short-story form as the leisurely novelette, padded out with infinite attention to detail.The tale differs from the short-story in that it is merely a succession of incidents without any real sense of climax other, for example, than might be given by the close of a man’s life, the ending of a journey, or the closing of the day. The tale is a chain; the short-story is a tree. The links of the chain may be extended indefinitely, but there comes a time when the tree can grow no longer and still remain a perfect tree. The tale is practically without organization and without plot—there [Pg xxviii] is little crisis, and the result of the crisis, if any there be, would be of no vital importance to the characters, for no special change in their relations to each other grows out of the crisis in the tale.A sketch is a lighter, shorter, and more simple form of fiction than the short-story. It exhibits character in a certain stationary situation, but has no plot, nor does it disclose anything like a crisis from which a resolution or denouement is demanded. It might almost be called a picture in still life were it not that the characters are likely to live and to move.In these introductory pages I have emphasized and reëmphasized these distinctions in various ways, because to me they seem to be important. But after all they are merely historical and technical. A man may be a charming fellow and altogether admirable even if his complexion quarrels with his hair and his hands do not match his feet in relative size.The present tendency of the British and American short-story is a matter of moment because no other literary form commands the interest of so many writers and readers. All literature is feeling the hand of commerce, but the short-story is chiefly threatened. The magazine is its forum, and the magazine must make money or suspend. Hence the chief inquiry of the editor is, What stories will make my magazine sell? And this is his attitude because his publisher will no longer pay a salary to an editor whose magazine must be endowed, having no visible means of support.These conditions force new standards to be set up. The story must have literary merit, it must be true to life, it must deal sincerely with great principles—up to the limit of popularity. Beyond that it must not be literary, truthful, or sincere. Popularity first, then the rest—if possible.All this is a serious indictment of the average magazine, but it is true. Only a few magazines regard their fiction as literature and not as merely so much merchandise, to be cut to suit the length of pages, furnish situations for pictures, and create subscriptions by readers. Yet somehow this very commercialized standard is working much good in spite of itself. It is demanding the best workmanship, and is paying bright men and women to abandon other pursuits in order to master a good story-telling method. It is directing the attention of our ablest literators to a teeming life all about them when otherwise they might lose themselves in abstractions “up in the air.” It is, for business reasons, insisting upon that very compression to which Maupassant attained in the pursuit of art. It is building up a standard of precise English which has already advanced beyond the best work of seventy years ago—though it has lost much of its elegance and dignity.In a word, the commercialized short-story is a mirror of the times—it compasses movement, often at the expense of fineness, crowds incidents so rapidly that the skeleton has no space in which to wear its flesh, and prints stories mediocre and worse because better ones will not be received with sufficient applause.But while the journalized short-story adopts the hasty standards of the newspaper because the public is too busy to be critical, in some other respects it mirrors the times more happily. The lessons of seriousness it utters with the lips of fun. Its favorite implement is a rake, but it does uncover evils that ought not to remain hidden. Finally, it concerns itself with human things, and tosses speculations aside; it carefully records our myriad-form local life as the novel cannot; and it has wonderfully developed in all classes the sense of what is a good story, and that is a question more fundamental to all literature than some critics might admit.Here then is a new-old form abundantly worth study, for its understanding, its appreciation, and its practise. If there is on one side a danger that form may become too prominent and spirit too little, there are balancing forces to hold things to a level. The problems, projects and sports of the day are, after all, the life of the day, and as such they furnish rightful themes. Really, signs are not wanting that point to the truth of this optimistic assertion: The mass of the people will eventually do the right, and they will at length bring out of the commercialized short-story a vital literary form too human to be dull and too artistic to be bad.SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES FOR CLASSOR INDIVIDUAL STUDY OF A SHORT-STORY1. Estimating from an average page, how many words has this story?2. What type of story is it chiefly?3. Does it subordinately illustrate any other types also? If so, which?4. Is the title adequate?5. What is its theme?6. Write out a brief scenario of the plot.7. Are the incidents arranged in effective order?8. How many characters (a) speak, (b) are present but do not speak, (c) are referred to but are not present?9. Are the characters idealized, or are they quite true to life?10. Are the characters individualized? Point out how the author accomplishes this result.11. What is the author’s attitude toward his characters?12. What is the proportion of dialogue to description and comment?13. What do you think of the dialogue?14. Do you regard this story as being realistic, romantic, idealistic, or composite?15. Is the author’s purpose apparent? If so, what is it?16. Are there any weak points in the plot?17. Is the introduction interesting and clear?18. Does the story end satisfactorily?19. Is the conclusion either too long or too short?20. Would any parts of the story be improved either by shortening or by expanding? Be specific.21. Does the story arouse in you any particular feeling, or mood?22. What are the especially strong points of the story?23. Write a general appreciation, using about two hundred words.24. What is the final impression the story makes upon you?NOTENine distinct methods for the study of a novel are outlined in the appendix to The Study of a Novel, by Selden L. Whitcomb. Some of these may be applied to the short-story. Some excellent study methods and questions are given in The Writing of the Short Story, by Lewis Worthington Smith.FOOTNOTES: [1] Excellent and comprehensive works, dealing more especially with the English novel, are: The English Novel, Sidney Lanier (Scribners, 1883, 1897); The Development of the English Novel, Wilbur L. Cross (Macmillan, 1899); The Evolution of the English Novel, Francis Hovey Stoddard (Macmillan, 1900); A Study of Prose Fiction, Bliss Perry (Houghton-Mifflin, 1902); The Study of A Novel, Selden L. Whitcomb (Heath, 1905); The Technique of the Novel, Charles F. Horne (Harpers, 1908); Materials and Methods of Fiction, Clayton Hamilton (Baker-Taylor, 1908). [2] Good collections arranged historically are, The Book of the Short Story, Alexander Jessup and Henry Seidel Canby; and The Short-story, Brander Matthews. The former contains lists of stories short and long grouped by periods. [3] A full study of this character has been attempted in the present author’s Writing The Short-Story, Hinds, Hayden and Eldredge. New York, 1909. [4] Egyptian Tales, W. M. Flinders Petrie. [5] Stories from Homer, Church. [6] The Bible as English Literature, J. H. Gardiner. [7] A History of Latin Literature, George A. Simcox. [8] The fabliau, a French form adopted by the English, is an amusing story told in verse, generally of eight-syllable line. Another poetic form of the period is the lai, a short metrical romance. [9] The Italian novella was popular in England down to the late Elizabethan period. It is a diverting little story of human interest but told with no moral purpose, even when it is reflective. In purpose it is the direct opposite of the exemplum, which is a moral tale told to teach a lesson, and may be compared to the “illustration” which the exhorter repeats in the pulpit to-day. [10] For a fuller examination of the bibliography of the subject refer to the bibliographical notes in the books by Matthews, Baldwin, Perry, Jessup and Canby, Canby, Dye, C. A. Smith, and the editor of this volume—all referred to in detail elsewhere herein. A supplementary bibliographical note will also be found on p. 433. [11] For this important record of the discriminations of a critic little known in America, we are indebted to Professor C. Alphonso Smith’s work on The American Short Story. [12] Writing the Short-Story, p. 30.

I STORIES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE