Artifice and Artificiality in the Short Story: A Defense

In this week’s post, I ask your patience while I try to provide something of a theoretical context for my argument against “realism,” and for “artifice” in the previous post about drama and the short story.

In my opinion, there is nothing negative about the short story's artificiality. Why, when discussing an aesthetic object, should we take "artificiality" to be a bad word, especially the artificiality of unity and endings—two of the most important conventions of the short story form? Henry James, in his preface to Roderick Hudson, reminds us that stopping places in fiction are always artificial. As James puts it, since universally relations stop nowhere, "the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Similarly, critic J. Hillis Miller has noted that it is always impossible to tell whether a narrative is complete. If the ending is considered a tying up into a knot, the knot could always be united again; if the ending is considered an unraveling, a multitude of loose threads remain, all capable of being knotted again. This is why, Miller says, the best one can have is the "sense of an ending."

The coiner of that nicely-turned phrase, Frank Kermode, also reminds us, "We always underestimate the power of rhetorical and narrative gestures." Endings, says Kermode, "are always faked, as are all other parts of a narrative structure that impose metaphor on the metonymic sequence.” In other words, any time we arrange a narrative sequence to achieve a meaningful end we inevitably "fake" the ending. For this faking of an ending is the very act that makes meaning out of the "one-damned-thing-after-another" that meaningless events (as opposed to end-directed and meaningful discourse) always are; such faking thus constitutes the essence of narrative art.

Many critics have suggested that the faking of endings was primarily a negative characteristic of nineteenth-century short fiction; they are fond of citing such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Frank Stockton, and O. Henry as the chief culprits. Not until the work of Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson and Joyce, many critics like to claim, did the short story develop a "natural" structure that was "open-ended," reflecting a realistic "slice-of-life."

These critics ignore that at the very height of the so-called "artificial-ending" phase of the short story in America, writers were so aware of the formalized nature of short-story endings that they parodied this convention by making it the very subject of their stories. Moreover, in spite of all the praise for the realism of the modern short story, from the "slice-of-life" anecdotes of Anton Chekhov to the intense "hyperrealism" of Raymond Carver, the twentieth-century short story has remained highly formalized, artificial and metaphoric like its nineteenth-century antecedents. What has changed is that a new convention of the form developed to increase the illusion of everyday reality. From Chekhov to Sherwood Anderson to Bernard Malamud and finally to Raymond Carver, the short story has been bound to a highly artificial, rhetorically-determined unified structure, and therefore formalized ending, which depends upon the artificial devices of aesthetic reality.

One of the primary characteristics of the modern short story ala Chekhov is the expression of a complex inner state by the presentation of selected concrete details rather than by the creation of a projective parabolic form or by the depiction of the contents of the mind of the character. Significant reality for short-story writers beginning with Chekhov is inner rather than outer, but the problem they have tried to solve is how to create an illusion of inner reality by focusing on external details only. The result is not simple realism, but rather a story that even as it seems a purely surface account of everyday reality takes on the artificial aura of a dream.

I suggest that a basic difference between the novel and the short story has to do with their use of detail. The novel gains assent to the reality of the work by the creation of enough detail to give the reader the illusion that he "knows" the experience, although of course he cannot know it in the same way that he knows actual experience. In the short story, however, detail is transformed into metaphoric significance.

For example, the hard details in Robinson Crusoe exist as a resistance to be overcome in Crusoe's encounter with the external world. However, in a short story, such as Hemingway's "Big, Two-Hearted River," which is also filled with details, the physical realities exist only to embody Nick's psychic problem. As opposed to Crusoe, Nick is not concerned with surviving an external conflict but rather an internal one. In the short story the hard material outlines of the external world are inevitably transformed into the objectifications of psychic distress. Thus at the end of Hemingway's story, Nick's refusal to go into the swamp is purely a metaphoric refusal, having nothing to do with the "real" qualities of the swamp. Only aesthetic resolution of the story is possible.

When critics scorn the short story for the artificiality of its highly unified structure, when they take it to task for the falsity of its placing so much emphasis on its ending, they obviously forget in their demand that all narrative follow the conventions of realism that the essence of art is artificiality. Consequently, they forget that the short story is the most artificial and thus the most artistic of all narrative forms.

More Stories from 2009 PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories

I am sorry to be away from this blog so long, but I have been on the road with family. We stopped a few days ago in Jackson, Mississippi to visit the home of Eudora Welty, one of my favorite writers. What impressed me most about this lovely Tudor style home just across the street from Belhaven College was its unpretentiousness, just like its wonderful former owner. The kitchen looked right out of the late forties and there were books stacked in every room.

I have been reading more stories in the 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize stories and have the time today to make a few comments, which hopefully will stimulate some discussion among the readers of this blog.

“Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress” by Mohan Sikka—The story is told from the point of view of a man who is recalling when he was ten and living with his grandparents. I am afraid I am not familiar with the changing values of the Indian family that Sikka says is the background fro his story. What I like most about the story is the way Sikka develops the character of the conniving grandmother, who feels that by destroying the relationship of Uncle Musto and the younger Rose, she can make her husband pay for an indiscretion in the past when such relationships were more tolerated. What leaves a sour taste for the grandmother at the end and for the reader also, at least this reader, is how ultimately the servant class pays the price for the crime--based on the lingering assumption that two years in jail is something the servant can more easily bear than members of the military class to which the grandfather and grandmother belong.

“Kind” by L.E. Miller—I was not really engaged by this story. The central interest seems to be Edith, the kind of woman who has chosen a life of “voluntary poverty,” which I assume refers to the emotional poverty of her life. I guess I don’t really see the relationship between the narrator Ann and Edith. What is Ann’s stake in the story?

“Icebergs” by Alistair Morgan—What Morgan calls the main themes of his story—loneliness and isolation—come through very strongly for me. I am engaged by the narrator who has lost his wife and is losing his daughter. But what Morgan calls the peripheral context for the story—the real events of an African finance minister stealing money from his country—seem to me to have no relevance to those themes. Morgan says the back story “moves the plot,” but if the plot has nothing to do with the themes, then what is the point of the plot except merely to be plot—stuff that happens? If it is not meaningful stuff, then why is it in the story?

“The Camera and the Cobra” by Roger Nash—I like this story, but then I am a sucker for a story that is so tightly wound with imagery that it seems more a poem or a picture or a parable than a narrative. I like the image of the ants in the camera. I like the imagery of things appearing and disappearing, of alternating moments of uncertainty and clarity. If you did not suspect that Nash was a philosopher after reading this story, you would know it for sure when you read his discussion of the background for the story—a discussion as dense in its way as the story itself.