SHORT STORY: A GENRE WORTH ATTENTION

SHORT STORY: A GENRE WORTH ATTENTION

Tatiana Komarova

Assistant Professor, The National University of Science and Technology MISIS,

Russia, Moscow

In comparison with prose, fiction or novels, short stories fairly frequently get overlooked as a form of art. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy to point out that short story provides readers with all the drama, compelling characters, descriptive language, though noticeably in a truly compact package, which makes short story quite a particular matter to take a closer look at.

William Carlos Williams characterises the short story as a brush stroke and the novel as a picture [Brown 1981]. B. Eichenbaum claims that the story is a climb to a vantage point and the novel “a long walk through various localities with a peaceful return trip assured” [Eichenbaum 1968].

The short story is a literary genre of fictional prose narrative that is generally concerned with a particular effect which is conveyed in a certain part of it or in a few significant scenes. Taking into consideration the form of the genre, we can mention that it encourages some fundamental elements inherent only in short story. They are as follows:

• presence of central theme or moral lesson
• economy of setting
• disclosure of a character in action
• abundance of stylistic devices
• omission of a complex plot
• concise narrative

Short stories have their deep roots in oral story-telling and the prose anecdote that can be defined as a swiftly-sketched situation that comes to its culminating point in a short period of time. It is interesting to note that before the 19^th century the short story was not viewed as a distinct literary form or genre. Regardless, it may seem a uniquely modern literary genre to some extent but as a matter of fact it is almost as old as language itself. The society has always enjoyed different kinds of brief narratives, such as moralizing short myths, fairy tales, jests, historical legends, etc. Though none of the mentioned narratives constitutes a short story but they still make a great part of the medium inside of which we witness its modern emergence.

With the rise and spread of comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version of it. Its first independent examples can be found in the tales by E.T.A. Hoffman, a German Romantic author of Gothic horror and fantasy. In the 19^th century short stories used to be a staple of early appearing magazines that helped much in leading to fame quite a number of authors with their novel-length works. Among such writers we can trace such names as of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Boleslaw Prus, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. Through the middle of the 20^th century the short story as a genre received little critical attention and investigation. Moreover, the most valuable works and studies of this form had limitations concerning region or era. The Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor tried in his “The Lonely Voice” (1963) to account for this literary genre by making a suggestion that stories are a means for “submerged population groups” to address a dominating community. However, the majority of other theoretical discussions and studies were predicated in different ways on Edgar Allan Poe’s thesis that stories are to obtain a compact unified effect.

A more modern view on what has served as a basis for the emergence of the short story genre is concerned with the two concepts of a ‘sketch’ and ‘tale’ that prevailed in the 19^th century. The two mentioned terms seem to establish the opposites or polarities of the milieu out of which the current understanding of the genre grew. If we are to compare the two, we may note that the tale is a lot older than the sketch as it provides a culture’s natural framework for such issues as its vision of itself and its homeland or for expressing and presenting its conception of its ancestors and gods. Tales are often understood by the members of some particular culture they belong to as tales usually include deployed motifs, symbols and characters, perpetuating the values and identification of a certain culture. Meanwhile, the sketch is intercultural. Its main aim is to depict some phenomenon of one culture for the pleasure or benefit of the other one. In general, the sketch is more descriptive and analytical and less narrative by comparing it with the tale. The sketch is more of an incomplete, suggestive nature, while the tale is overstated and even hyperbolic. The primary mode of the tale is spoken and that of the sketch, written. The tale is nearly almost a recreation of the past and the tale-teller can be called an agent of time. In comparison, the sketch writer is more of an agent of space, who brings an aspect of one culture to the attention of the other one.

Some researches oversimplify the idea that the tale was the one and only type of short fiction until the 16^th century for the evident reasons that a rising social class was much interested both in exotic lands and social realism, which put a premium on sketches of foreign regions and destinations and, consequently, subcultures. The so-called ‘fathers’, the names of who are mentioned above, initially combined elements of the tale with components of the sketch. The general effect was to mitigate some of the stultifying conventionality and fantasy of the tale and to liberate the sketch from its ‘servitude’ to strict factual evidence present even though each writer worked in his own way. Subsequently, the modern short story is considered to be something in between the highly imaginative tale and the photographic sketch.

Among the most well-known short stories writers, we can remember such names as of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, P.G. Woodhouse, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. As it has been stated earlier, each writer had his own path, it might be interesting to deliver some examples of the said contrasting ways the authors resorted to. For instance, the stories by William Faulkner more closely resemble the tale as in most cases his literary pieces are recognized for a heavy flavour of the past: his subject matter, his language are rich in traditional material. Meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway’s short stories are closer to the tale even though they may frequently gain their force from an exploitation of traditional mythic symbols. E. Hemingway sometimes could submit his apparently factual stories as newspaper cope. Due to the virtue of the analytic and explorative qualities, E. Hemingway’s stories are still more than journalistic sketches, while W. Faulkner’s ones are more than Southern tales though a Southerner might have well suspected that.

There are still those who refer to the genre of short story as a fusion of tale and sketch, but it is difficult to argue and dispute about the fact that at present the short story is an autonomous and distinct genre. The matter that it has not stopped developing only reinforces the evidence of its own separate path [URL: britannica.com].

Today one of the still existing problems of the short story as a genre is the determination of what exactly separates it from longer formats. Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of the said genre is regarded as a classic one. In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) he makes a point that a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting. Other definitions presuppose the maximum word length at 7,500 words. If we take into consideration the contemporary usage, then the term ‘short story’ is most often referred to a work of fiction that is no longer than 20,000 words and at the same time no shorter than 1,000. Stories that are less than the minimum mentioned are usually called “Flash Fiction” [Deirdre Fulton, 2008]. In longer forms of fiction, there is a tendency that short stories consist of such parts as:

• exposition in which we are introduced with the setting, main characters and the situation;
• complication that is to present the event setting the conflict;
• rising action;
• crisis that is viewed as the decisive moment for the protagonist and his or her commitment to a course of action;
• climax, or the point of highest intensity and interest in terms of the conflict and the point with the most action;
• resolution, or the point when the conflict is resolved;
• moral.

There are some stories that do not follow the proposed pattern mostly because of their length. One of the features that distinguishes modern short stories is an abrupt beginning with the story starting to evolve in the middle of the action, though a climax, a crisis, or a turning point are still to observe. The endings of quite a number of short stories are as well cut abruptly and left open with or without particular practical lesson or moral.

There are all kinds of categories of the genre: horror, biography, crime, detective, history, adventure, thriller, dystopia, drama, science fiction, supernatural, action, tragedy, politics, satire, philosophy, mystery, comedy, utopia, romance and even Western. Among the most common types of the story are:

• Frame story (it is also known as a nested narrative or a frame tale; a literary technique of placing a story within a story with the aim to introduce or set the stage for the principal narrative or even a series of short stories).
• Sketch story (it is a short piece with little or without at all plot; it is most commonly a description of some character or location; character sketches serve as a good way to build and develop a character in a longer literary piece).
• Fable (it is a succinct story the main characters of which are usually anthropomorphic creatures; the goal of a fable is to tell a story with a moral, which is out at the end of it).
• Flash fiction (a short literary piece, the word count of which is between 300 and 1000 words).
• Anecdote (a short account of something amusing, funny or entertaining, which usually tells a story about a real incident or person; they are mostly used to illustrate or support a point in a chapter, article; on the whole, they are short, but there are no concrete limitations to its length).
• Drabble (it is an exceptionally short piece of fiction without a title; as it usually contains 100 words, the major purpose of it is brevity though colourful and meaningful expression of ideas).
• Vignette (it can be an independent part of a larger work; it is a very impressionistic piece of fiction that is focused on a single idea, setting, object, character or scene). 
• Feghoot (it is a humorous piece with an atrocious pun in the end; it is rather short but illustrative, leading up to the pun).
• Mini-saga (a short story in exactly 50 words; it works as a test in brevity of saying a lot with a little).

Due to the fact that most academics consider short story as rather light and not worthy of serious investigation genre, it has maintained in a way marginal status and this marginality has allowed a considerable degree of artistic freedom to short story writes, freedom to experiment with both form and content, which is not typical of any other literary genre. It seems clear that the flexibility inherent in short story encourages us to characterize it as having many forms and shapes and continuing its evolution still. For example, B. Eichenbaum writes a convincing study of O’Henry’s short fiction. He states that O’Henry’s style is a parody of the literary conventions of his time and at the same time proving it to be less convention-restricted as a genre. B. Eichenbaum also adds that Porter’s writing has encouraged and enabled the evolution to the next stage in American short-story writing, which continues to undergo changes and makes the non-stop development of the genre possible and privileged [Eichenbaum 1968].

In conclusion, the genre of short story constituting a great part of literature deserves certain and special attention and analysis. It has been disregarded for quite a long time for the reasons of its compact size primarily though it has been proved that short story makes an independent branch of the literary text. It continues to undergo changes and evolve due to its convention-free status. Short story demands from the reader to take the text as raw material to be completely formed and rethought retrospectively in his or her own mind as the short story writer compensates for the loss of length in favour of the pleasures of impact and intensity, which again leads us to the idea that this genre is worth attention, and the fact that so many prominent writers contributed to the development of this genre, only highlights more its separate and notable role among the other genres.

References:

1. Brown S., Dimensions and Genre: Towards a Theory of the Short Story. Ph.D. dissertation. – Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania. – 1981. – pp. 53-54.
2. Eichenbaum B., O’Henry and the Theory of the Short Story. - Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press. – 1971. - pp. 227-272.
3. O’Connor F., The Lonely Voice. - Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. – 1963. – 228 p.
4. American Literature [Электронный ресурс] / https://americanliterature.com/ Режим доступа: свободный (Дата обращения: 08.06.2023)
5. Britannica [Электронный ресурс] /https://www.britannica.com / Режим доступа: свободный (Дата обращения: 13.06.2023)