Chapter 2 - Short Story: Its Formal Features

Transcription

1 32 Chapter 2 - Short Story: Its Formal Features The short story has firmly established itself as a favourite form in modem literature. Its immense vogue is the result of many cooperating causes; among them, the rush of modem life, which has made men impatient of those "great still books" (as Tennyson called them) over which readers were glad to linger in more leisurely ages, and the enormous development of the magazine, in which a large field is naturally afforded for tales complete in a single number. So popular, indeed, has the story become that extraordinary claims are at times put forth in its behalf. We are even told that it is the new form of fiction, and that ultimately it will displace the novel entirely. Such claims, however, may be safely set aside. The story is not in the least likely to displace the novel for the very good reason that it cannot meet the novel on the novel's own ground, or do precisely what the novel does. It cannot, for instance, exhibit life in its variety and complexity, for this needs a larger canvas than the story provides. Nor, for the same reason, can it deal with the evolution of character, which is one of the most important problems of modem prose fiction. Quite manifestly the spiritual history of Levin in Anna Karenina, and the study of Tito Melema's moral downfall in Romola, would be impossible within the framework of the short story. It is a matter of common experience that we have to live for some time with men and women and to see them in different relationships and it

2 33 circumstances before we get really to know them; and this is as true of men and women in fiction as it is of men and women in actual life. But in the short story we meet people for a few minutes and see them in a few relationships and circumstances only; and while it is indeed true that concentration of attention upon a particular aspect of character may result in a very powerful impression, still, as a result, such impression is not exactly comparable with that left by an ampler, more detailed, and more varied representation. Hence, those characters in fiction that dwell in our imaginations as fully portrayed and completely alive, are, generally characters in novels. So long as people are interested in the intricacy and many-sidedness of life and in minute studies of character in the making or the unmaking, we may thus safely conclude that the novel will hold its own as the representative type of modem literary art. The tendency of the short story to run into sequences (as in Stevenson's New Arabian Nights and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books) is itself suggestive of a desire on the part of its writers to escape from its formal limitations. We may interpret such examples of emancipation as attempts to combine the brevity and concentration of the story with something of the sustained interest of the novel on the side either of character or of plot. It is difficult to define a short story. No single formula will cover its immense range and variety. It is indeed a far cry from the primitive legends to the subtle sophistications of Maupassant. It is a malleable mould which can be used to express any mood, from that

3 34 of vulgar- passion to high-bred ennui. It can be romantic and sentimental, ironic or humorous, lyrical or objective. It is this variety that makes it so impossible to define it. For working purposes, however, we need a rough definition to start with and that suggested by Edgar Allan Poe will do well enough: A short story is a prose narrative " requiring from half an hour to one or two hours in its perusal."1 Putting the same idea into different phraseology, we may say that a short story is a story that can be easily read at a single sitting. It will be easier, however, to comprehend its real nature by placing it against the novel. A novel cannot be abbreviated into a short story, nor can a short story be expanded into a novel. The novel deals with incidents progressing with cause and effect inter-relations through a series of climaxes towards an ultimate solution. It is the modem counterparty of the epic. Its object is the grand totality of life. But a short story exposes a situation embodying a mood. Its aim is to comprehend the unity of a mood. Unlike a novel, therefore, it does not admit of a large number of characters nor a variety of interest. Whereas the novel is expansive, the short story is concentrated, and the more it strays away from the centre, the less does it conform to its type. It's nearest literary type is the one-act play. Judging its relation to other forms of narrative art, it can be said that a true short story differs from a simple incident in that it makes use of suspense; from the sketch, in that it has action moving towards an end; from the novel, in that it can present only one crisis, one momentary unit of

4 35 life; and from the drama, in that it may be intensely subjective and may dispense with dialogue almost completely if need be. It is now very commonly recognized that a true short story is not merely a novel on a reduced scale, or a digest in thirty pages of matter which would have been quite as effectively or even more effectively, handled in three hundred. The older forms of story, indeed, exhibit in general a very imperfect differentiation of the growing type from the parent stock. Thus, for instance, Dickens's Christmas Books are in organism simply novels, though novels in a small scale. Now it is clear that since Dickens's time the distinction has been emerging into greater and greater clearness, between the materials and method of the novel and the materials and method of the story. Even today we meet with innumerable indeterminate productions the place of which is on the borderline between the two classes of fiction. But, on the whole, the increasing popularity of the story has brought with it an increasing sense that considerations of art involve various specific requirements of matter and treatment. In other words, as the story differs from the novel in length so it must of necessity differ from it in motive, plan and structure. Though the short story has to deal with incidents, it is severely selective in its use of these. The selection is influenced by the writer's way of looking at life. He may be said to focus a flash of imaginative vision on these specific points which are significant for his purpose. After all, the incidents are not the end of his art; they are only the means - the end being his vision, that particular something that the

5 36 writer has seen, of which the specific incidents are a reflection. Behind the vision, again, there is the writer's mood, the originating point of his perception. Hence, the short story must express the dominant mood through which particular incidents may reveal themselves to him, and from which they take their peculiar form and colour. The subject of a story must be one that can be adequately and effectively developed within the prescribed limits. On this point the reader's own feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction will provide a sufficient test. Whatever its particular theme and object, a story should leave us with the conviction that, even if nothing would have been lost, at least nothing would have been gained, by further elaboration. It should impress us as absolutely clear in outline, well proportioned, full enough for the purpose yet without the slightest suggestion of crowding, and within its own framework complete. It does not mean that a story must necessarily be confined to a single incident or moment. A story may be little more than an anecdote worked up into literary form, and its success may depend entirely upon the skill shown in the telling. It may deal with some one phase of character or experience, or with a detached critical scene. But, on the other hand, it may cover a wider field of time and involve a larger sequence of events than many novels. For example, in Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, we have the tale of a life-time; yet as even the least critical reader will instinctively feel, the effect is greatly enhanced by that concentration of interest which inevitably results

6 37 when such a subject is put into so small a space, and in particular, by the fact that no extraneous matter is allowed to intrude between the moment of Rip's falling asleep and that of his waking. In the same manner, Maupassant's grim little masterpiece, La pasure, contains the long-drawn-out tragedy of many years; yet once more an enormous artistic gain is achieved by the focusing of attention throughout upon the single motive on which the story turns, and by the rigorous exclusion of everything not directly connected with it When, therefore, we insist that the subject of a short story must be one that can be adequately and effectively handled within the limits of the short story, we must not forget that in this, as in all other forms of art, the question of subject is vitally bound up with that of treatment. Characters play an important role in a short story since it is impossible to conceive incidents apart from characters. The exposition of character, however, is not its main function, as it usually is in a novel. Characters, like the incidents to which they are inter-linked are the raw materials: they exhibit the mood and take colour from it. If the writer's mood is ironic or saturnine, romantic or cynical, intensely personal or insolently objective, the characters will be modified to conform to the mood. Hence a multiplicity of characters is completely ruled out, since that may destroy the integrity of the mood. Another fundamental principal of composition is that of unity; under which head we include unity of motive, of purpose, of action

7 38 and in addition unity of impression. There can be no exception, that a short story must contain one and only one informing idea, and that this idea must be worked out to its logical conclusion with absolute singleness of aim and direction of method. It is this essential kind of unity which will be found to characterize every really good short story, whether it belongs to the highly concentrated type, like Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, and Stevenson's The Sieur de Maletroit's Door; or the highly expanded type, like Maupassant's La Parure; or to any type the place of which is somewhere between the two extremes. In the case of the novel, so many different elements may be woven into the texture that it may be difficult to detect any central organizing principle, while at times analysis may reveal two or more quite distinct pivots of interest. No such scattering of attention can be permitted in the story. Here, on the contrary, the germinal idea must be perfectly clear and the interest arising out of it must be perfectly clear and the interest arising out of it must never be complicated by any other consideration. Singleness of aim and singleness of effect are, therefore, the two great cannons by which we should try the value of a short story as a piece of art. Attainment of this unity is one of the principal difficulties of short story writing; and in passing it may be noted that it is largely because the art of the short story is so much more exacting than that of the novel that many critics rate it higher than the novel, and that perfection of workmanship in it - the complete adaptation of means

8 39 to end - gives peculiar aesthetic pleasure to the thoughtful reader. As Poe said: "A skillful literary artist... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents - he then combines such events - as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there, should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel."2 This must, of course, be taken as a counsel of perfection; but it is useful as indicating that theoretic standard of excellence which we shall do well to keep in view. By reason of its brevity and concentration, the short story manifestly demands particular care in all the details of composition. For more than in the novel, everything superfluous and redundant must be omitted, the proper perspective must be maintained, the emphasis justly distributed, the necessary values given to the successive movements of the narrative, and the separate parts strictly subordinated to the whole. Technical defects in the story, it should be noted, stand out with much greater clearness than the same defects in the novel; Scott's clumsiness in getting his plots started, for instance, while bad enough in Waverley, nearly ruins

9 40 My Aunt Margaret's Mirror, At the same time, it is obviously impossible to lay down any abstract rules for construction. Here, as always, method must ultimately depend upon matter and purpose. A story may, for example, contain little or no dialogue, or, it may be nearly all dialogue; and while in the great majority of cases the amount of description introduced must be small, occasionally, as in Cable's Old Creole Days and Stevenson's island Night's Entertainments, local colour is an essential feature and the expansion of description is therefore fully justified. The great principle of all true art is thus again applicable; details can be rightly estimated only by reference to the total design. It is obvious that to express a complex mood with all its incidents and characters, fused into a compact unity, demands the highest form of art. It is not the mirror of life but the mirror of a moment. That moment has to be isolated from all that is not strictly relevant to it. There is no scope for excursion into a world of fancy or diversion into the world of facts. It must be felt to be its essence, and nothing contributes so much to that essence as atmosphere. Atmosphere is the modification of the environment to harmonize with the mood. The dark rain-clouds will not accord with the sunshine of romance unless the artist views it lighted up with the rainbow of hope. Atmosphere, in other words, must be symbolical. The writer of short stories must select each symbol to contribute a precise quality. For he cannot, unlike a novelist, expand or diversify.

10 41 Hence, the short story focuses attention on a significant moment, expresses it through relevant incidents, and makes the incidents operative through the action of characters, and throws over all a symbolical atmosphere that holds the entire structure in a unified form. Or to use R.L.Stevenson's formula, "There are as far as I know three ways, and three ways only, of writing a short story. You may take a plot and fit the characters; or you may take a character and choose incidents or situations to develop it; or, lastly, you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to express and realize it."3 It is, perhaps, impossible to evolve a common structure for such an elastic literary form as the short story is. The variations are too great to admit any precise formal treatment Yet it is also true that all expressions of life in art follow a certain pattern - the five-fold structure that is envisaged in drama. There is the opening situation or prologue, the unexpected complications, the tension of a climax, the resolution of the climax, leading to the denouement. It is possible that the total stress may be varied according to the effect that is intended to be created, but both the complication and the resolution must create suspense or surprise. That indeed gives a peculiar interest to the denouement. Each of these serves a special purpose in relation to the whole. Thus the opening situation serves the purpose of supplying just the minimum of information, necessary for understanding and intelligently enjoying the essential motive of the story. A novelist

11 42 may dawdle over details, but a story-teller has to economize, and therefore, he must use the prologue to reveal the scope of the story and nothing more. In other words, he must supply details immediately wanted. Much of its success will depend on the skill with which the author utilizes the opening situation for engaging the interest and the attention of the reader. But this part is comparatively easy in relation to the next stage, the development of the story through complications. The opening details must be so subdued as to make the complication emerge as an unexpected surprise. It is the significant twist - a casual remark, a symbolical gesture, - that excites interest and stimulates curiosity. A writer uses dramatic irony to the same effect, but he has a more extended range. Within his limitatiohs, the story-teller has to be much more vigilant. For the mere surprise is not enough: it must be logically motivated. Naturally complications, especially if they are unexpected, create a tension, which forms the crisis of the story. It is the centre of interest, because it is the nucleus of the mood, of which the story is the expression. The crisis is implied in the plot. Its chief contribution to the evolution of the plot is to induce a feeling of suspense: how is it going to be solved? Thus it looks forward with eagerness to the solution of the suspense. The solution also, like the complication, must have an element of surprise. Its purpose is to relieve the tension. Here the structure of the short story is different from, say, that of the novel or the drama.

12 43 Iii a short story the solution merges into the denouement. For the emotional tension can be relieved only by the exposure of the solution. Here also the art of surprise, skillfully used, is highly effective. It relieves the tension but heightens the mood. For, by now, the reader is completely in accord with the mood of the writer. This is the object of all art, - realization of a mood through sympathy, through complete identification with the mood expressed. Of course, a merely mechanical manipulation of these contributing factors cannot make a great work of art. The artist must know how to synthesize and breathe into the whole the spirit of life. This depends on maintaining exact proportion between these elements in relation to the central or originating mood. He must know how much to express, how much to suppress, the exact point of aesthetic interest.

13 44 References 1. W.H.Hudson, An Introduction to the Study of Literature, George G. Harrap & Co., London, 1963, p Review of Hawthorne's Twice- told Tales. 3. Quoted in Literary Essays by D.N.Ghosh, Modem Book Agency Pvt. Ltd., Calcutta, 1977, p. 267.