Short Fiction in the Turn of the Twentieth Century: 1880-1920

Introduction

Until the early nineteenth century, short prose fiction was primarily a vehicle for didactic messages, often religious in nature. Romantic writers, wishing to preserve the old values without the religious dogma and mythological trappings, secularized the old stories by presenting them as basic psychic processes. The ballad tale that had previously existed as received story now became infused with the subjectivity of the teller. The famous collaboration of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads (1798) marked the beginning of this shift.

Wordsworth’s task was to choose situations and scenes from everyday life and by a process of defamiliarization suggest the spiritual value latent within them. Coleridge, on the other hand, was to take supernatural stories or situations and give them the semblance of reality by making them projections of the artist’s psyche. Often in these “lyrical ballads,” the story element was subsumed by the lyrical element because of their emphasis on the poet’s subjective impression. However, the German Romantics, from whom Coleridge gained many of his critical assumptions, were more committed to stories with the lyrical element concealed behind the hard outlines of the event. American writers, also strongly influenced by the Germans, similarly turned from Romantic poetry to Romantic tale. The short story as developed by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne was the narrative side of what Coleridge and Wordsworth were doing with the lyric poem in England.

The United States

New literary movements often begin as a reaction against whatever literary movement is predominant at the time, especially when the conventions of the existing movement become stereotyped. Realism, which dominated the writing of fiction during the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, was a reaction against the stereotyped sentimentalizing of the Romantic movement that prevailed during the early part of the century. The basic difference between Romantics and realists is a philosophic disagreement about what constitutes significant “reality.” For the Romantics, what was meaningfully real was the ideal or the spiritual, a transcendent objectification of human desire. For the realists, what mattered was the stuff of the physical world.

One of the first results of this focus on the everyday real rather than the transcendent ideal in American fiction was the so-called local color movement; for the more a writer focused on the external world, the more he or she emphasized particular places and people, complete with their habits, customs, language, and idiosyncrasies. Whereas it seldom mattered where in the physical world the stories of Hawthorne and Poe took place (for they always seemed to take place in the mind of the characters or in some fabulist world between fantasy and everyday reality), the stories of Bret Harte were grounded in the American West, just as the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett were tied to New England. The realists wished to localize characters in a physical world and ground their lives in a social reality.

Although the realist assumption, however, began to predominate in the latter part of the century, Romanticism remained; the result was two branches of the local color movement: the earthy Western folktale and the Eastern sentimental story. Sometimes these two types merged, as they did in the stories of Harte, who managed to combine the sentimental idealism of the East with the humorous realism of the West. Sometimes the conflict between the two types was satirized, as it was in Mark Twain’s famous story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” in which a Western tall-tale artist gets the better of a genteel easterner. Other well-known stories of the period, such as William Dean Howells’s “Editha” and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun,” expose the sterility of genteel idealism when it is cut off from the facts of everyday reality and physical life.

The clearest example of the gradual movement from the local-color story to the well-made story in the late nineteenth century is Kate Chopin, who was more influenced by Guy de Maupassant’s tightly unified stories than by the southern regionalists. Of the more thanr forty stories published in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), some of the best-known are formal stories very close to Maupassant anecdotes. For example, “Madame Celestin’s Divorce” is a simple story in the Maupassant mode about a lawyer, Paxton, who advises a woman to divorce her drinking, wife-beating husband. The lawyer, thinking he will then marry her, falls into the habit of dreaming of taking a wife. She meets him on the street and tells him that her husband is home and has promised to turn over a new leaf. “La Belle Zoraide” is a sentimental story about a servant who has an illegitimate child, but whose mistress, not wanting to lose her services, sends it away and tells her it is dead. The servant pines away, caring for a bundle of rags that represent the baby to her. Even when the mistress relents and brings the actual baby to her, she will have nothing to do with it and lives to be an old woman with her bundle of rags.

Chopin’s best-known story is “Désirée’s Baby,” for in it the formal structure of the story and its Maupassant-like reverse ending is made more complex by the importance of the social issue on which it depends. This was Chopin’s most successful story during her lifetime and has received renewed attention since the advent of feminist criticism. However, many recent critics feel they must apologize for or justify the story’s trick ending, suggesting Chopin’s most important literary forefather, Guy de Maupassant. The importance of paternal names is introduced very early, for Armand does not care that Désirée is nameless (the name her foster mother has given her suggests that she was desired), for this means he can all the more easily impose his own family name—one of the oldest and proudest in Mississippi—on her when they marry. Indeed Désirée says Armand is particularly proud that the child is a boy who will bear his name. Armand’s home shows little of the softness of a woman, suggesting instead the strictness of a male monastic life, with the roof coming down steep and black like a cowl and with big solemn oaks whose branches shadow the house like a pall. The “shadow” metaphor is further emphasized by Désirée’s growing suspicion that there is some air of mystery about the house and by her efforts to “penetrate the threatening mist” about her.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman moves the short story further away from local-color regionalism and closer to modern impressionism and tight thematic structure by combining detailed realism with the thematic patterning pioneered by Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ivan Turgenev, and Sherwood Anderson. In“A New England Nun” Louisa, the central character, is a Jamesian figure shut away from the flow of everyday life. The focus of the story is her “artistic” control over the order and neatness of her solitary home, for which she rejects the masculine disorder of her impending marriage. Louisa is not romantic but realistic, attentive to detail; however, she has “almost the enthusiasm of an artist over the mere order and cleanliness of her solitary home.” She worries about the disorder of coarse masculine belongings strewn about in endless litter.

Upon learning of the love between Lily and Joe, she parts with him, like a queen “who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession.” She looks ahead

through a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness. . . . Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloisterd nun.

This sort of genteel withdrawal from life into an artistic and idealistic pattern receives harsh criticism from Howells, the so-called father of American realists, in his most famous story, “Editha.” Editha extols the Romantic ideal of war so much that her fiancé George joins the Army to please her. When he is killed and Editha goes to see his mother, the older woman chastises her severely for her foolish romanticism. As the story ends, however, Editha, while having her portrait done, is confirmed in her own view when she tells the artist about it and the woman says, “How vulgar!” Although the content of the story rejects the idealistic, “artistic” view typical of Romanticism for a more everyday human reality, its own form, like most Romantic short stories, is a tightly organized aesthetic pattern.

In addition to the emphasis on local color, another result of the shift from Romanticism to realism in the latter part of the century was a shift from the focus on form to the focus on content. For the Romantics, pattern was more important than plausibility; thus, their stories were apt to be more formal and “literary” than the stories of the realists. By insisting on a faithful adherence to the stuff of the external world, the realists had to allow content—which was often apt to be ragged and random—to dictate form. Because of this shift, the novel, which can expand to create better an illusion of everyday reality, became the favored form of the realists, while the short story, basically a Romantic form that requires more artifice and patterning, assumed a secondary role.

Poe and Hawthorne knew this difference between the two forms well and consequently, by means of a tightly controlled form, created a self-sustained moral and aesthetic universe in their stories. Those writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century who were committed to the short-story form instead of the novel were also well aware of this fact. For example, when Ambrose Bierce entered into the argument then raging between the Romantics and the realists, he attacked the Howells school of realist fiction by arguing, “to them nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man’s most commonplace experience.” Bierce was interested in those extreme rather than ordinary moments of human experience when reality became transmuted into hallucination. His best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” ironically focuses on a real world that seems sterile and lifeless and a fantasy world (in the split second before death) that seems dynamic and real. Tight ironic patterning is what creates the similitude of reality in this story, not a slavish fidelity to the ordinary events of the world.

Bierce’s short stories deal with those moments when people act in such a way that even those closest to them cannot understand what motivates them. Bierce’s most obsessive concern in the short story is not simple macabre horror but rather the central paradox that underlies the most basic human desire and fear—the desire for a sense of unity and significance and the fear that the realization of such a desire means death. Bierce’s characteristic short-story tactic is to distance his characters from the ordinary world of everyday reality by presenting them in a static formal posture or picture, by putting them in a dreamlike autistic state, or by putting them on a formal stage. In a Bierce story, when this formal picture or frozen sense of reality is broken, the result is often the shock of entering another realm of reality.

“Chickamauga” is a particularly rich example of this theme of unreality presented as reality. The story opens with the child’s play with a toy sword as he postures in ways he has seen in pictures in his father’s military books, overcoming invisible and imaginary foes. When he sees men crawling through the woods, he associates them with pictures he has seen—dog, pig, bear. However, to maintain the tension between the play reality of the child and the war reality of the adult, Bierce asserts an adult perspective on the boy’s experience, noting that all he describes would not have been seen by the child but rather “by an elder observer” or “an observer of better experience.” The story focuses on the two basic worlds: child and adult, fantasy and reality, innocence and experience. When the child reaches home, it is as if he has gone a long way to stay where he was; the plantation “seemed to turn as if on a pivot.” The story ends with the boy’s loss of his mother and the reader’s discovery that he is a deaf mute, his final inarticulate and indescribable cries suggesting grief that goes beyond language.

The relationship between static reality and dynamic reality is again emphasized in “The Man and the Snake,” in which Harker Brayton, while reading in bed, sees two small eyes and the coils of a snake in his room. Brayton is not afraid but rather conscious of the incongruity of the situation, “revolting, but absurd.” He decides the snake is not dangerous but “de trop—‘matter out of place,’” an “impertinence.” Bierce emphasizes that as these thoughts formed in Brayton’s mind, in a process called “consideration and decision,” the “secret of human action” is initiated. When he looks at the eyes of the snake, the spell of the perverse reasserts itself so that even as he tries to brace himself back, he slowly advances toward the snake on his elbows. The reader’s final discovery that the snake is stuffed and the eyes two shoe buttons does not trivialize Brayton’s death but rather emphasizes Bierce’s typical theme of the power of imaginative reality to triumph, sometimes heroically, sometimes tragically, sometimes grotesquely, over everyday reality.

Bierce’s most famous narrative play with the frozen moment of time and the power of imaginative reality is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The story explicitly and sardonically exploits the idea of the reader being pulled up short as Peyton Farquhar comes to the end of his rope and faces the ultimate and only genuine “natural end” possible—death. However, in this story death is forestalled in the only way it can be forestalled—through an act of the imagination and an elaborate bit of fiction-making that the reader initially takes to be reality.

The first part of the story, the only part in which the realistic convention suggests that something is “actually happening,” seems static and dead, a still picture, formalized and stiff. At the end of part 1, the teller tips the reader off to the narrative necessity of time: “As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.” The self-reflexive reference here is to the most notorious characteristic of fiction—the impossibility of escaping time. In spite of the fact that the author wishes to communicate that which is instantaneous or timeless, he is trapped by the time-bound nature of words that can only be told one after another. This rhetorical acceptance of the nature of discourse motivates the final fantastic section of the story. Rather than being a cheap trick dependent on a shocking ending, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a complex narrative reflecting both in its theme and its technique the essential truth that in discourse there is no ending but an imaginative, that is, an artificial, one.

Those late nineteenth century writers who have had the most influence on the short story in the twentieth century were the ones who not only wished to present so-called realistic content but also were aware of the importance of technique, pattern, and form. For example, Henry James argued (as Poe did before him) in his influential essay The Art of Fiction (1884) that a fictional work is a “living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found . . . that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.”

An important fictional treatment of the tension between the “real” and artistic technique is James’s famous story “The Real Thing.” The artist in the story pays so much attention to the social stereotype that his models represent that he is unable to penetrate to the human reality beneath the surface. As James makes clear, however, in his preface to the story, as an artist, what he is interested in is the pattern or form of the work—its ability to transcend mere narrative and communicate something illustrative, something conceptual: “I must be very clear as to what is in this idea and what I wish to get out of it. . . . It must be an idea—it can’t be a ‘story’ in the vulgar sense of the word. It must be a picture; it must illustrate something . . . something of the real essence of the subject.”

Although James’s artist in the story insists that he cherishes “human accidents” and that what he hates most is being ridden by a type, the irony of which James himself is aware is that the only way an artist can communicate character is to create a patterned picture that illustrates something; there is no such thing as a “human accident” in a story. As he argues in The Art of Fiction, a work of art is not a copy of life, but far different, “a personal, a direct impression of life.” James says that the supreme virtue of a work of fiction is “the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life.” The emphasis for James is on “impression” and “illusion”—both of which create and derive from artistic form and pattern.

James’s focus on “impression” indicates an inevitable shift from realism as merely a kind of mirror held up to external reality to what is called either naturalism or verism, in which the focus is on the writer’s reaction to that external reality. As critic Mark Schorer has pointed out, Hamlin Garland’s “veritism” or verism) differs from Howells’s realism chiefly in its emphasis on impressionism and its insistence that fiction develop a form based on the moment of experience. Although the artist attempts to be perfectly true to life, there is always a tone or a color that comes unconsciously into his or her work, argues Garland. Garland’s reputation rests particularly on his collection of short stories, Main-Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories (1891), of which the best-known stories are “The Return of the Private,” “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip,” and “Under the Lion’s Paw.” Garland differs from many other local-color writers of the period in his avoidance of sentimentalism and his outrage at social injustices. Most critics suggest that the impressionism in his stories moves readers closer to the more powerful impressionism of Stephen Crane.

Many critics have claimed that Crane marks the true beginnings of the modern short story in the United States. It is Crane’s impressionism—the combination of the subjectivity of Romanticism with the so-called objectivity of realism—that does most to effect this transition. The result is not an emphasis on reality communicated by the mere description and narration of events one after the other in a temporal fashion but rather reality suggested by moments of time frozen into a kind of spatial stasis by the impression of the perceiver. For the impressionist, reality cannot be separated from the superimposition of attitudes, emotions, and feelings of the perceiver.

One of Crane’s best-known impressionistic stories is “The Blue Hotel,” in which complex image patterns convey the formal and mechanical unreality of the events. The real issue, however, of unreality versus reality here centers on the character of the Swede. The irony of the story turns on the precipitating fact that the Swede, as a result of reading dime Western fiction, enters the hotel feeling that he will be killed there. This obsession that he has entered into a fictional world that has become real prevails until the hotel keeper, Scully, takes him upstairs and convinces him that the town is civilized and real, not barbaric and fictional. When the Swede returns, he is transformed; instead of being a stranger to the conventions that he thought existed in the hotel, he becomes familiar and at home with them, too much at home.

Perhaps the best way to understand the Swede’s situation is to see the story as being about the blurring of the lines between the fictional world and the real world. Scully has convinced the Swede that what he thought was reality—the childlike world of the dime Western—was a game after all. Thus, the Swede decides to “play” the game. Indeed the card game forms the center of the story and leads to its violent climax, when the Swede, following the conventions of the Western novel, accuses Johnny of cheating, even though the game is “only for fun.” The fight that follows is a conventional device of the dime Western.

The Swede wins because of the superiority of his new point of view: He can now self-consciously play the fictional game that Johnny and the others take seriously; while they rage with impotent anger, he only laughs. The final irony takes place when the Swede, still within the conventions of the game, leaves the hotel and enters a bar. When he tries to bully the gambler into drinking with him, the gambler, being a professional who does not play for fun, stabs the Swede, who falls with a “cry of supreme astonishment.” Thus the Swede’s premonition at the beginning of the story is fulfilled: His initial “error” about the place is not an error at all; it is a violent and barbaric world.

Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” also derives from the naturalist/impressionist approach favored by Crane. Like “The Blue Hotel,” it is a story in which the world of the everyday and the world of the artwork become tragically blurred. Paul has a “bad case” because he wishes to be a character in the world of art, but he is trapped in the everyday world of ordinary reality. The theme of “Paul’s Case” is the realistic one of the squashing of the artist by a middle-class, bourgeois environment.

During the local-color movement, there was also a “return to Poe” by such critics as Brander Matthews and such writers as Frank R. Stockton and Ambrose Bierce. With these writers, the focus, as in Poe, was not on the ragged reality of the everyday but on the patterned reality or ironic story. The title of Brander Matthews’s book The Philosophy of the Short Story (1901), however, indicates that he was as much influenced by Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” as he was by his Twice-Told Tales review. Perhaps Matthews believed that Poe was completely serious in his famous description of how he wrote “The Raven.” Most Poe critics agree that while the raven in Poe’s poem is brought to life by the creative imagination, in his after-the-fact justification of the poem it is a stuffed and lifeless affair indeed. Matthews seemed to prefer the philosophy to the creation. As a result of his misreading of Poe, the short story in the early twentieth century came to be considered merely a question of taxidermy after all.

Even then, however, Matthews’s formal rules for the genre might not have had such a disastrous effect if O. Henry had not had such great popular success with his formula stories at about the same time. The writers rushed to imitate O. Henry and the critics rushed to imitate Matthews, both with the same purpose in mind: popular financial success. Anyone could write short stories if he or she only knew the rules. J. Berg Esenwein’s Writing the Short Story (1909), Carl H. Grabo’s The Art of the Short Story (1913), and Blanche Colton Williams’s A Handbook on Story Writing (1917) are only three of the countless such books published in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Finally, the serious readers and critics called for an end to it, filling the quality periodicals with articles on the “decline,” the “decay,” and the “senility” of the short story. One critic, Gilbert Seldes, summed up the reaction at its most extreme in The Dial in 1922: “The American short story is by all odds the weakest, most trivial, most stupid, most insignificant artwork produced in this country and perhaps in any country.”

According to many critics, the most famous source of this formalization of the American short story was O. Henry—a local-colorist writer focusing on the city of New York who so emphasized the ironic pattern of his stories that his name has become associated with the formulaic short story. O. Henry’s popularity and his output were unprecedented. By 1920, nearly five million copies of his books were sold in the United States. Ironically, while he was being soundly scolded by the serious critics in the United States, who preferred the more serious slice-of-life stories of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in Russia others were praising O. Henry for his mastery of the complex conventions of storytelling.

O. Henry poses the same problem for a history of the short story that Harte does, for as with Harte, O. Henry’s influence far exceeds his excellence as a short-story writer. However, like Harte, O. Henry was the right man at the right time, a writer who pushed the well-made formal nature of the short story to its furthest extreme.

O. Henry wrote so many short stories so rapidly that he became the quintessential example of Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien’s accusation that the short story had become a machine-made product. However, his best-known stories are those that reflect the kind of reverse ending for which he was famous: “The Gift of the Magi,” “Mammon and the Archer,” “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Furnished Room,” and “A Municipal Report.” O. Henry is the writer with which Frederick Lewis Pattee ends his classic history of the development of the short story, citing him as the master of the “that reminds me of another” story, but a writer, for all his smooth slick style, of no depth, no thought, no philosophy, no moral complexity. The problem of O. Henry is that he is a master of technique and to cite him as a representative short-story writer is simply to say that technique is more important for the short story than these other aspects.

At the turn of the century the name O. Henry was synonymous with the short story as a form. For many readers still, the notion of what a short story is derives from the kind of trick or twist ending associated with such O. Henry stories as “The Gift of the Magi,” a sentimental story about the poor young couple—he who sold his watch to buy combs for her long hair and she who sold her hair to a wig-maker to buy a chain for his gold watch. Not many O. Henry stories deal with serious issues in a serious way; they are either sentimental or else they are comically ironic. “The Cop and the Anthem” is of the latter kind, but just because it does not carry a heavy theme or a serious idea does not mean that it will not repay a close study.

The character of Soapy is as important to this story as its ironic structure, in which every action that he takes creates a reaction opposite to the one he wishes. The basic irony of the story is that as long as Soapy is “free,” that is, loose in the city, he is not free at all because of the coming winter. If he were in prison, however, he would indeed be “free” to enjoy life without fear. However, Soapy does not want something for nothing; he is willing to pay for his room and board by going to some effort to commit an act that, according to the law, will get him in jail. The ultimate irony is that Soapy, who does not want something for nothing and who goes to a great deal to get thrown into jail, finally does get thrown into jail for doing precisely nothing.

Stories during the latter part of the nineteenth century that succeed in sustaining the tradition of the Romantic short story and signify the transition to modernism of the new century are those that are concerned with the inner complex jungle of the psyche, such as the stories of Henry James, or the impressionistic symbolic world of violence and sensations, such as the stories of Stephen Crane—not the stories by realist writers who focused on the social world.

In order to understand the shift that takes place between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1920’s—a period that marked a rebirth of the short-story form—one must look at the loss of confidence in the social codes during the period. Literary critics of the time suggested that the short stories of the nineteenth century, mainly action stories, depended on two basic faiths: that one can know right from wrong because a basic social code of values was taken for granted and that people were what they seemed to be.

In the twentieth century, argued critic Bonaro Wilkinson Overstreet, perhaps as a result of World War I, people have lost these faiths and consequently are “thrown back upon a study of human nature—human motives, fears, wants, prejudices.” The drama of the twentieth century is “the drama of what goes on in the mind,” and the short story is an “expert medium for the expression of our deep concern about human moods and motives.” In his study of this transition to the modern short story, Austin McGiffert Wright says that while the world of the nineteenth century was relatively stable with substantial agreement on the worth of society and social principles as moral guidance, the world of the 1920’s was “fragmented both socially and morally,” with each person obliged to find the appropriate principles for guidance. It is this distinctly modern world that the modern short story, ushered in by the publication of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), reflects.

France

Many critics argue that realism began in Europe with the publication of the first installment of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886). Later, in his best-known short fiction, “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” (“The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler”), Flaubert returned to the medieval saint’s legend or folktale to find a model for both its character and its form. Flaubert’s moral fable, however, differs from its medieval source by representing the static and frozen nature of the medieval story itself. The subject matter of Flaubert’s story, although it has a moral issue at its center, is the method by which the medieval tale is made moral and illustrative. The events of the story are frozen into timelessness even as the storyteller relates them as if they were occurring in time. The story poses an answer to the primal question “What is the true self?” by structuring the two basic means by which one tries to find the self, that is, by assertion or by denial.

The transition from Flaubert to Maupassant is relatively easy to chart, for Flaubert was an important influence on Maupassant, reading his early work and encouraging him. In the decade between 1880 and 1890, Maupassant published more than three hundred short stories in a variety of modes, including the supernatural legend, the surprise-ending tale, and the realistic story. Although he is best known for such surprise-ending tales as “La Parure” (“The Necklace”) and is most respected for such affecting realistic stories as “Boule de Suif” (ball of fat), Maupassant also contributed to the sophistication of the traditional horror story by pushing it even further than Poe into the modern mode of psychological obsession and madness. Maupassant got his start as a writer in much the same way that Chekhov in Russia and O. Henry in the United States did—by publishing anecdotal and ironic sketches or stories in that most ephemeral of media, the newspapers.

Maupassant’s first full volume of short fiction appeared in 1881 under the title of his second important story, “La Maison Tellier” (“Madame Tellier’s Establishment”), a comic piece about a group of prostitutes who attend a first Communion. After the success of this book, Maupassant published numerous stories in newspapers and periodicals, which were then reprinted in the volumes of his stories that began to appear at the rate of approximately two a year. Many of his stories created much controversy among the French critics of the time because he dared to focus on the experiences of so-called lowlife characters.

In addition to the realistic stories of the lower class, however, Maupassant experimented with mystery tales, many of which are reminiscent of the stories of Poe. Instead of depending on the supernatural, these stories focus on some mysterious dimension of reality, which is justified rationally by the central character. As a result, the reader is never quite sure whether this realm exists in actuality or whether it is a product of the obsessed mind of the narrator.

In 1884, Maupassant published his most famous short story, “La Parure” (“The Necklace”), which has become one of the most famous short stories in any language. Indeed, it has become so famous that it is the story that most commonly comes to mind when Maupassant’s name is mentioned, in spite of the fact that most critics agree that Maupassant’s creation of tone and character in such stories as “Boule de Suif” and “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” is much more representative of his genius than this ironically plotted, brief trick story about the woman who wasted her entire life to pay back a lost necklace, only to discover that it was fake.

“Le Horla” (“The Horla”), a story almost as famous as “The Necklace,” focuses on the central character’s intuition of a reality that surrounds human life but remains imperceptible to the senses. What makes the story distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to account for his madness as caused by something external to himself. “The Horla” is a masterpiece of horror because it focuses so strongly on the mistaking of inner reality for outer reality, which is the very basis of hallucination.

Maupassant belongs with such innovators of the short-story form as Chekhov, Turgenev, Bierce, and O. Henry. On the one hand, like O. Henry, he mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number of characters in a luminous situation. Because of his ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the complex human mind, Maupassant is an important figure in the transition between the nineteenth century tale of the supernatural and the twentieth century short story of psychological obsession.

Germany

Although the French bias was that prose fiction is committed to deal with the actual world rather than the transcendental or the immanent, just the opposite assumption was growing in the nineteenth century in Germany. Many German critics argued that short fiction was the ideal form for the movement called “poetic realism,” a phrase coined by Otto Ludwig to characterize that period between Romanticism and the beginning of naturalism in Germany—the 1830’s through the 1880’s. Poetic realism deals with the realm midway between objective truth and the patterned nature of reality; thus, it united naturalism’s focus on the multiplicity of things and idealism’s focus on abstract unity underlying the multiplicity. Poetic realism in Germany is simply another name for what was being called impressionism in France and the United States. What must be communicated by the artwork is not simply the subject, as in Romanticism, or the object, as in realism, but rather the tone or atmosphere that creates the communication between the subject and the object.

Although Thomas Mann, the most important German fiction writer of this period, is best known for his novels, he began his career writing short fiction. His greatest work in this genre, Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice, 1925), is particularly modern in its transformation of the temporal events of story into spatial reality by the device of the leitmotif, which Mann claims to have used in a directly musical way and which determines the whole mode of presentation of the work. The basic motifs of the story—mock action, significant encounter, transience of time, presence of death, nature of love—are repeated throughout in various guises. Moreover, the story is a classic example of short fiction’s midway point between realism and myth, between external reality and subjective reality, as embodied in Aschenbach’s yearning to escape the cold and rigid artwork into the passion and the impulsive life of experience itself. The story suggests that the experience that overtakes Aschenbach is one that is necessary to transform him from his inauthentic abstract self into the concrete but “messy” life of existential reality. Throughout the complex imagistic action that propels the story, Aschenbach begins to emerge as his own creation, one who has become transformed into a character in one of his own fictions; art, not an active life, has taken over the modeling of his features.

This basic conflict between the Romantic inclination toward fantasy and dream and the realist tendency toward the external world receives one of its most successful treatments in modern short fiction in Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936). The extreme step that Kafka takes is to make the transformation of the psychic into the physical the precipitating premise from which the entire story follows. The only suspension of disbelief required in the story is that the reader accept the premise that Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant dung beetle. Once the reader accepts this event, the rest of the story is quite prosaic, quite detailed, and (with the exception of leaving the description of Gregor purposely vague) fully externalized. The Metamorphosis is an exemplar of the typical short-fiction effort to present an inner state of reality as a fantastic but real outer event. Thematically, the story also is exemplary, for it presents the little man who, by his very grotesqueness, challenges the other to love him. In his transformation of the details of everyday life into hallucination and nightmare, Kafka is the prototype of the modern tendency in short fiction to challenge the realist assumption of what reality is by pushing it to grotesque extremes.

Russia

Although modern short fiction in Russia begins with Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy, it reaches its complete maturity with Anton Chekhov. Dostoevski’s most influential short fiction, Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Letters from the Underworld, 1913; better known as Notes from the Underground), reflects the modern transition to an existential philosophy and an impressionistic technique by being structured in two parts to represent the two basic means by which one tries to know the self: introspection and narrative. It reverses the Socratic injunction that the unexamined life is not worth living to suggest the Hamlet theme—that the intensely examined life is unlivable. The basic theme of Tolstoy’s Smert’ Ivana I’licha (1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1887) is made clear in the classic syllogism: “Ivan Ilyich is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, Ivan Ilyich is mortal.” In its transformation of this abstract syllogism into a concrete reality, however, the story also reflects the modern short fiction combination of the conceptual and the concrete. Indeed, it is about the transformation of Ivan himself from abstract man into concrete man.

The most influential figure in the development of modern short fiction in Russia, and in many ways in the world at large, is Chekhov. Chekhov’s short stories were first welcomed in England and the United States just after the turn of the century as examples of late nineteenth century realism, but since they did not embody the social commitment or political convictions of the realistic novel, they were termed “realistic” primarily because they seemed to focus on fragments of everyday reality. Consequently, they were characterized as “sketches,” “slices of life,” “cross sections of Russian life,” and were often said to be lacking those elements that constitute a really good short story. At the same time, however, other critics saw that Chekhov’s ability to dispense with a striking incident, his impressionism, and his freedom from the literary conventions of the highly plotted and formalized story marked the beginnings of a new or “modern” kind of short fiction that combined the specific detail of realism with the poetic lyricism of Romanticism.

The Chekhovian shift to the “modern” short story is marked by a transition from the Romantic focus on a projective fiction, in which characters are functions in an essentially code-bound parabolic or ironic structure, to an apparently realistic episode in which plot is subordinate to “as-if-real” character. Chekhov’s fictional figures, however, are not realistic in the way that characters in the novel usually are. The short story is too short to allow for character to be created by the multiplicity of detail and social interaction typical of the novel.

Once it is seen that the short story, by its very shortness, cannot deal with the denseness of detail and the duration of time typical of the novel but rather focuses on a revelatory breakup of the rhythm of everyday reality, one can see how the form, striving to accommodate “realism” at the end of the nineteenth century, focused on an experience under the influence of a particular mood and therefore depended more on tone than on plot as a principle of unity—all of which led to the significant impressionistic influence.

Although Chekhov’s conception of the short story as a lyrically charged fragment in which characters are less fully rounded realistic figures than embodiments of mood has influenced all twentieth century practitioners of the form, his most immediate impact has been on the three writers of the early 1920’s who have received the most critical attention for fully developing the so-called modern short story: James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson.

The most obvious similarity between the stories of Chekhov and those of Joyce, Anderson, and Mansfield is their minimal dependence on the traditional notion of plot and their focus instead on a single situation in which everyday reality is broken up by a crisis. Typical of Chekhov’s minimalist stories is the often-anthologized “Misery,” in which the rhythm of the old cabdriver’s everyday reality is suggested by his two different fares, a rhythm that Iona himself tries to break up with the news that his son is dead. The story would indeed be only a sketch if Iona did not tell his story to his uncomprehending little mare at the end, for what the story communicates is the comic and pathetic sense of the incommunicable nature of grief itself. Iona “thirsts for speech,” wants to talk of the death of his son “properly, with deliberation.” He is caught by the primal desire to tell a story of the breakup of his everyday reality that will express the irony he senses and that, by being deliberate and detailed, will both express his grief and control it. In this sense, “Misery” is a lament—a controlled objectification of grief and its incommunicable nature by the presentation of deliberate details.

The story therefore illustrates one of the primary contributions that Chekhov made to the modern short story—the expression of a complex inner state by the presentation of selected concrete details rather than either by a parabolic form or by the depiction of the mind of the character. Significant reality for Chekhov is inner rather than outer reality, but the problem he tried to solve is how to create an illusion of inner reality by focusing only on external details. The answer for Chekhov, and thus for the modern short story generally, was to find an event that, if expressed “properly”—that is, by the judicious choice of relevant details—embodied the complexity of the inner state. T. S. Eliot later termed such a technique an “objective correlative”—a detailed event, description, or characterization that served as a sort of objectification or formula for the emotion sought. Modern short-story writers after Chekhov made the objective correlative the central device in their development of the form.

Such Chekhov stories as “Sleepy” and “The Bishop” make use of another significant modern short-story technique: focusing on reality as an ambiguous mixture of the psychic and the external. “Sleepy” marks a sort of realistic halfway point between the symbolic use of the hypnagogic state by Poe and its being pushed to surrealistic extremes by Kafka. Chekhov presents a basically realistic situation of the young Varka being literally caught in a hypnagogic state between desirable sleep and undesirable reality. The two realms blend indistinguishably in her mind until the hallucination takes over completely and she strangles the baby so she can sleep as “soundly as the dead.” Although the irony of the ending is obvious, it is the hypnotic rhythm of the events and the hallucinatory images blending dream and reality that make the story a significant treatment of the short-story device of dissolving the rhythm of everyday reality into the purely psychic.

Chekhov’s adoption of such an impressionistic point of view is what makes him both a master of the short story and an innovator of its modernity. Critic Peter Stowell has made a strong case for understanding Chekhov’s modernism as a result of his impressionistic point of view. The ambiguous and tenuous nature of experience perceived by the impressionist, says Stowell, “drives the author to render perceptually blurred bewilderment, rather than either the subject or the object.” What is rendered, says Stowell, is the mood and atmosphere that exists between perceiver and perceived, subject and object. In this way, impressionism and modernism become synonymous terms.

Like Chekhov, both Anderson and Joyce focus on the central themes of isolation and the need for human sympathy and the moral failure of inaction that dominate the modernist movement in the early twentieth century; both abjure highly plotted stories in favor of seemingly static episodes and “slices” of reality; both depend on unity of feeling to create a sense of “storyness”; and both establish a sense of the seemingly casual out of that which is deliberately patterned, creating significance out of the trivial by judicious selection of detail and meaningful ordering of the parts. The result is an objective-ironic style that has characterized the modern short story up to the present day. It is a style that, even as it seems realistic on its surface, in fact emphasizes the radical difference between the routine of everyday reality and the incisive nature of story itself as the only means to know true reality. Contemporary short-story writers push this Chekhovian realization to even more aesthetic extremes.

It is with Chekhov that the short story was liberated from its adherence to the parabolic exemplum and fiction generally was liberated from the tedium of the realistic novel. With Chekhov, the short story took on a new respectability and began to be seen as the most appropriate narrative form to reflect the modern temperament. There can be no understanding of the short story as a genre without an understanding of Chekhov’s contribution to the form. Conrad Aiken’s assessment of him in 1921 has yet to be challenged: “possibly the greatest writer of the short story who has ever lived.”

England and Ireland

The English, with the exception of modern Irish writers, have never excelled in the short-story form. The reason may have something to do with the English attitude toward a cohesive society. Critic and literary historian Lionel Stevenson has suggested that as soon as a culture becomes more complex, brief narratives expand or “agglomerate” and thus cause the short story to lose its identity. The fragmentation of sensibility necessary for the development of the short story did not set in in England until about 1880, at which time the form came to the fore as the best medium for presenting it. As another critic, Wendell V. Harris, has noted, with the fragmentation of sensibility, perspective (or “angle of vision”) becomes most important in fiction, especially in the short story, in which instead of a world to enter, as in the novel, the form presents a vignette to contemplate. The essence of the short story, says Harris, “is to isolate, to portray the individual person, or moment, or scene in isolation—detached from the great continuum—at once social and historical. . . . The short story is a natural form for the presentation of a moment whose intensity makes it seem outside the ordinary stream of time . . . or outside the ordinary range of experience.”

It is an interesting irony that the 1890’s, the period which H. G. Wells called “The Golden Age” of the short story in England, derived, although in an indirect way, from Poe; for it was Poe who inspired Charles Baudelaire, who in turn inspired the Symbolist movement, which ultimately gave impetus to the development of the short story during this period. For Poe, and later for Baudelaire and the aesthetes, the “art” of the story itself was what was important in life, and life was important because of art’s ability to make matter and events meaningful.

Increasingly, the view that art should deemphasize the social and emphasize the formal dominated what critics have called the “state of mind” that was the 1890’s in English literature. Short fiction of the so-called fin de siècle exemplifies this view in various ways, from the allegory of George Gissing’s “House of Cobwebs” to the parable form of Arthur Symons’s “Christian Trevalga,” and from the aesthetic embodiment of Ernest Dowson’s “The Dying of Francis Donne” to the satiric shaft of Max Beerbohm’s “A. V. Laider.”

Gissing’s best-known story, “House of Cobwebs,” is primarily an allegory of the artist. Through the symbol of the house of decay and cobwebs, with its choking artichokes, Gissing suggests that the artist cannot survive the middle-class world of the realists. Symons’s “Christian Trevalga” is a parable of the artist who carries the theories of Stéphane Mallarmé to their ultimate conclusions, for Christian reaches a state of music without sound just as Mallarmé desired to reach a state of literature without words.

Dowson’s “The Dying of Francis Donne” and Beerbohm’s “A. V. Laider” represent two opposite extremes of the short fiction of the fin de siècle. Dowson suggests the period’s morbid self-consciousness, and Beerbohm reflects its final ability to mock itself satirically. The famous story to which “The Dying of Francis Donne” is likely to be compared is Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Unlike the middle-class Ivan, however, for whom the process is ironically the only “living” he has ever experienced, Francis Donne is a doctor, a “student” of life and death. Moreover, as opposed to Ivan, for whom awareness of death begins with the absurd act of bumping his side while hanging drapes, Donne’s awareness begins with his diagnostic and reasoning ability. Beerbohm’s “A. V. Laider” is a clever and well-constructed manipulation of the conventions of storytelling. The story is similar in its use of storytelling as the basis of a trick played on the reader to Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and Saki’s “The Open Window.” Such stories lay bare by means of parody one of the form’s essential characteristics: the projection of an imaginative reality that can only temporarily be taken to be real.

Another short-fiction form popular in England at the beginning of the twentieth century is the ghost story or mystery story. However, as Algernon Blackwood, one of the most influential of the mystery story writers, has made clear, the primary interest of these writers was not the ghost story as such but rather stories of extended consciousness. “My fundamental interest,” said Blackwood, “is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty.” Fiction writers who hold to such a vision are more often likely to be short-story writers than novelists and not merely writers of the so-called supernatural story. Whereas novelists are most likely to build on the assumption that everyday reality is primary reality, true reality for the short-story writer is more often a function of the imagination.

H. P. Lovecraft has called “The Willows” the foremost Blackwood tale, an opinion with which many critics of the supernatural story agree, seeing it as typical of Blackwood’s thematic structure of having an average man, through a “flash of terror or beauty,” experience something beyond the sensory reality of the everyday. The ambiguity, as is usually the case in nineteenth century short fiction, stems from whether one understands the experience to be external or internal—that is, whether it actually occurs in the world of the story or the events are hallucinated by the character.

The best-known story of Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett), “The Ghosts,” is a self-conscious parody of the ghost story, for it makes explicit the conventions and rules of the genre. As is typical of such parodies, the story depends on the conventions of its generic models even as it mocks them. For example, “The Ghosts” begins with a traditional description of the conventional ghost-story setting—an old house surrounded by whispering cedars and encrusted with antiquity. The problem here is to determine what ontological status the ghosts maintain: Are they real and thus manifestations of the place, or are they manifestations of the hallucinatory state of the protagonist?

To move from the stories of Dunsany to those of Saki (H. H. Munro) is to move from the world of story as a means to parody story to a world in which story is presented as a joke, sometimes a bitter joke, but a joke nevertheless. Saki may very well mark a decided shift in Edwardian short fiction to the trick-ending story that dominates popular short stories both in England and in the United States at the turn of the century. Saki’s most anthologized story, “The Open Window,” is a particularly clear and simple example of foregrounding the process of story itself, for what makes “The Open Window” work is the uncertainty, felt both by the protagonist and by the reader, about the nature of the story that they are listening to or reading. The dramatized storyteller is the typical Saki artist who manipulates the reader into various possibilities about the genre of the story, only to reveal that the story is about the process of turning fantasy into supposed fact and that it is fantasy after all.

In his study of the short story, Walter Ernest Allen calls Walter de la Mare the most distinguished of the writers who made the Edwardian age a “haunted period” in English literature. Part of the reason for this is the “dignity” of the poetry of de la Mare as opposed to what is often called the “crude gothicism” of his contemporaries. Lord David Cecil calls de la Mare a Symbolist for whom the outer world is only an “incarnation of an internal drama.” He says that de la Mare is concerned with the most profound human issues, particularly the central issue of whether the world has any objective existence or is a reflection of the mind, which alters, depending on the mood and character of the observer. For de la Mare, only the imagination makes reality significant, and what is called external reality itself is like a dream. All these characteristics, which are actually characteristics of the short-story genre itself, can be seen most readily in de la Mare’s best-known and most anthologized story, “The Riddle,” a delicate fable about the passing of youth.

It is no coincidence that the first British writer to be recognized as a specialist in the short story is also the champion of the romance form in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Nor is it coincidence that this short-story specialist was one of the first British short-fiction writers to focus, as did Henry James, on technique and form rather than on content alone. The writer is Robert Louis Stevenson, and many critics suggest that it is with his work that the true modern short story began in England. Both Lionel Stevenson and Walter Ernest Allen say that the watershed for the modern short story began in 1878 with the publication of “A Lodging for the Night,” with Allen going so far as to say that the change to the specifically modern short story can be precisely dated at that point.

Like his fellow romance writer in the United States, Ambrose Bierce, Stevenson urges that literature, when it is in its most typical mode of narrative, flees from external reality and pursues “an independent and creative aim.” For Stevenson, the work of art exists not by its resemblance to life, “but by its immeasurable difference from life.” Such an awareness was indeed essential before what critics call the “modern short story” could become possible in the nineteenth century.

“A Lodging for the Night”is a strange candidate for a landmark story that marks the shift to modern short fiction. Although it is highly detailed and focuses on a specific time-limited situation, it poses more questions about its status than clear answers. The secret of the story’s ambiguous mixture of horror and amusement depends solely on the nature of the poet François Villon, who alternates between attending to the immediate concerns of life to assure his own preservation and taking an amused and distant view of reality to indicate his own broad view of life. Villon survives not only because of his concern with immediate things but also because he can take such an ironic view of life and death. What Stevenson has done here is to create a story about the artist who transforms reality into art stuff; the story is an exercise in this seeming paradox, indicating that reality must be dealt with both in terms of practical existence and in terms of the ambiguous mixture of amusement and horror, for life and death must be mocked in order to transform them into art at all.

Although Stevenson is the first British writer to build his career on the short-story form, Rudyard Kipling is the first to stimulate a considerable amount of criticism, much of it adverse, because of his short fiction. Much of the negative criticism that Kipling has received, however, is precisely the same kind of criticism that has often been lodged against the short-story form in general—for example, that it focuses only on episodes, that it is too concerned with technique, that it is too dependent on tricks, and that it often lacks a moral force. Lionel Trilling notes that the words “craft” and “craftily” are Kipling’s favorites, and Edmund Wilson says that it is the paradox of Kipling’s career that he “should have extended the conquests of his craftsmanship in proportion to the shrinking of the range of his dramatic imagination. As his responses to human beings became duller, his sensitivity to his medium increased.”

Kipling’s best-known stories—”The Man Who Would Be King,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “Mary Postgate,” and “The Gardener”—are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern short story—a transition, however, that Joseph Conrad, because of the profundity of his vision, perhaps was better able to make than Kipling. Many critics have suggested that “The Man Who Would Be King” is one of Kipling’s most Conrad-like stories but lament that Kipling evades the metaphysical issues implicit in the story and refuses to venture on the great generalizations forced upon Conrad in “Heart of Darkness.” Although “The Man Who Would Be King” does not contain the philosophic generalizations of Conrad’s tale, nor perhaps is it as subtle a piece of Symbolist fiction, nevertheless it is a coherent piece of fabular fiction carefully constructed and thematically significant.

The story focuses primarily on the crucial difference between a tale told by a narrator who merely reports a story and a narrator who lives a story. The frame narrator is a journalist whose job it is to report the doings of “real kings,” whereas Peachey, the inner narrator, has as his task the reporting of the events of a “fictional king,” telling a story of two characters who project themselves out of the “as-if” real world of the frame tale into the purely projected and fictional world of their adventure. The fact that Peachey and Davrot are really only overdetermined double figures is indicated not only by Peachey’s reference to himself as suffering Davrot’s fate but also by the fact that if Davrot is the ambiguous god-man, then it is Peachey who must be crucified. Kipling finds it necessary to make this split, for not only must he have his god-man die, but also he must have him resurrected. Peachey is the resurrected figure who brings back the head of Davrot, still with its crown, and tells the tale to the narrator. Peachey’s final madness and death and the mysterious disappearance of the crowned head climax a story that embodies a complex symbolic pattern.

Most critics agree, however, that it is Conrad who creates the true modern Symbolist tale. Conrad argued that fiction must aspire to the magic suggestiveness of music, that explicitness was fatal to art, for it robs it of all suggestiveness. This is the basis of Conrad’s impressionism, an impressionism that begins with Crane in the United States and is later extended by Anderson, Mansfield, and Joyce. Conrad has said that his best stories resulted from his attempt to give a story a “sinister romance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that . . . would hang on the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.” One of Conrad’s most famous impressionistic and symbolist stories is “The Secret Sharer.”

Making the psychological theme of the double plausible is the central problem in Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” for the double is not only projected outside the protagonist but also dramatized in the story as an external self who has been involved in a crime apart from the protagonist and whose crime is at the core of the moral issue facing him. The story itself is split between the plot, which focuses on the stranger and the captain’s efforts to protect and conceal him, and the mind of the captain, who obsessively persists in perceiving and describing the stranger Leggatt as his other self, his double. The story also depends on metaphorical details, which suggest that Leggatt has been summoned forth from the captain’s unconscious as an aspect of the self with which he must deal. Although it can be said that Leggatt represents some aspect of the captain’s personality that he must integrate—instinctive behavior rather than the Hamlet-like uncertainty he experiences on his first command—it is more probable that he is brought on board to make explicit and dramatically concrete the dual workings of the captain’s mind, which distract him and tear him apart. This creation of an “as-if” real character to embody what are essentially psychic processes marks the impressionistic extension of the trend that began the short-story form during the Romantic period.

Like Chekhov, whom she greatly admired, Katherine Mansfield was often accused of writing sketches instead of stories because her works did not manifest the plotted action of nineteenth century short fiction. The best-known Mansfield story similar in technique and theme to the typical Chekhov story is “The Fly.” The external action of the story is extremely slight. The unnamed “boss” is visited by a retired friend whose casual mention of the boss’s dead son makes him aware of his inability to grieve. The story ends with the boss idly dropping ink on a fly until it dies, whereupon he flings it away. Like Chekhov’s “Misery,” the story is about the nature of grief, and like Chekhov’s story, “The Fly” maintains a strictly objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to communicate the latent significance of the boss’s emotional state.

Mansfield, however, differs from her mentor Chekhov by placing more dependence on the fly itself, as a symbol of the death of the boss’s grief, his own manipulated son, or the trivia of life that distracts one from feeling. Moreover, instead of focusing on the inarticulate nature of grief that goes deeper than words, “The Fly” seems to emphasize the transitory nature of grief; regardless of how much the boss would like to hold on to his grief for his son, he finds it increasingly difficult to maintain such feelings. Such an inevitable loss of grief does not necessarily suggest that the boss’s feelings for his son are negligible; rather, it suggests a subtle aspect of grief—that it either flows naturally or else must be self-consciously and artificially sought after. The subtle way that Mansfield communicates the complexity of the boss’s emotional situation by the seemingly irrelevant conversation between the boss and his old acquaintance and by his apparently idle toying with the fly is typical of the Chekhovian device of allowing objective detail to communicate complex states of feeling.

Critics of the short story, such as H. E. Bates and Frank O’Connor, have suggested that the modern Irish short story began with George Moore’s publication of The Untilled Field in 1903. Others have concurred with Moore’s own typically immodest assessment that the collection was a “frontier book, between the new and the old style” of fiction. One can certainly agree with critics that the stories seem unique for their time in combining the content of French naturalism with the concern for style of the fin de siècle aesthetics. Moore’s view is that reality itself must be understood via story. This need to understand reality by means of story can be clearly seen in Moore’s best-known and most anthologized work from The Untilled Field, “Julia Cahill’s Curse,” for it is a fairly clear example of Moore’s effort to use the folktale mode as a means to understand social reality.

The basic situation of this tale is that of a story being told by a driver to the first-person narrator, who, on hearing the name Julia Cahill, urges the driver to tell him her story. The story, which indeed constitutes the bulk of “Julia Cahill’s Curse,” is of an event that took place twenty years earlier, when the priest Father Madden had Julia put out of the parish and consequently Julia put a curse on the parish that every year a roof would fall in and a family would go to America. The basic conflict in the tale is between Julia, who in her dancing and courting represents free pagan values, and the priest, who in his desire to restrain Julia represents church control of such freedom.

The conflict between Julia and the priest is clear enough, but it is the relationship between the teller and the listener that constitutes the structural interest of the story, for what the tale is really about is the nature of story used to understand social reality. The story is an actual event of social reality that has been mythicized by the teller and thus by the village folk both to explain and to justify the breakdown of Irish parish life in the late nineteenth century. The teller of the tale believes that the desertion of the parish is a consequence of Julia’s curse. The listener of the tale does not believe in the curse in this literal way but, as he says, for the moment he too believes it, at least in some way that is not made explicit. It is the nature of the belief that constitutes the difference and thus the significance of the story. What Moore does here is to present a story that is responded to within the story itself in both the old way and the new way—that is, as a literal story of magic and as a symbolic story to account for the breakdown of the parish life, the tension between pagan freedom and church control.

The typically modern theme of presenting the predominance of the inner life of imagination over that of the everyday can be seen in almost a paradigmatic form in “The Clerk’s Quest.” Although in the “old” romance story, everyday reality is broken up by the intrusion of the supernatural, in the modern story, it is often accident, and trivial accident at that, which creates the disruption of the rhythm of everyday reality. In a self-consciously economical prose style, Moore makes it clear that it is the “slight accident” of a perfumed cheque that destroys Dempsey’s “well-ordered and closely-guarded life.”

Indeed, the story is a self-conscious modern version of the chivalric romance story as the clerk gives up everything to go on his sacred quest, wandering through the countryside with presents of diamonds for the ideal stimulated by a cheque which smells of heliotrope. The mood of romantic fantasy and the ironic tone of parody of chivalric romance are completely sustained and self-conscious. At the conclusion of the story, the reader is torn between humor and pathos at the absurdity of the little clerk’s quest, as well as at its chivalric romanticism. The tragicomic result is not unlike that achieved by Chekhov, Anderson, Joyce, and Mansfield, who similarly present insignificant characters caught in a breakup of the routine of reality. The difference, here, however, is that Moore more obviously parodies the old romantic story, creating a “new” realistic version of the “old” romance form. As a result, he prepares the way for the modern technique of Joyce, who pushes the trivial and seemingly inconsequential realistic story to more subtle epiphanic extremes in the collection of short stories in Anglo-Irish literature that marks the end of the nineteenth century short-fiction tradition, Dubliners (1914).

Joyce’s most famous contribution to the theory and technique of modern narrative is his notion of the “epiphany,” which he explicitly defined in his novel Stephen Hero (1944):

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

In a Joyce story, and in many stories by other writers since Joyce, an epiphany is a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some revelatory aspect of human experience, some highly significant aspect of personal reality; it is usually communicated by a pattern of what otherwise would be seen as meaningless details and events.

Although any story in Dubliners would serve as an illustration of this epiphanic technique, Joyce’s most famous story, “The Dead,” makes it quite clear. The primary movement is from the objective world in part 1 to the lyrical quality created after Gabriel and his wife leave the party. This is paralleled by a movement in Gabriel himself from self-assertion to self-effacement. Concrete details predominate through the first two-thirds of the story, as everyday life seems to be fully embodied in the Christmas party. It is only in the last third, when Gabriel’s life is transformed, first by his romantic and sexual fantasy about his wife and then by his confrontation with love and death, that the reader reflects on the story and perceives that the concrete life in the earlier sections repeatedly revealed hints of death. Only after Gabriel’s epiphany, his true vision of his former self as death in life, does the reader perceive the concrete details and trivial remarks of the earlier portion as symbolically meaningful. The lyrical and symbol-laden language of the final section of the story casts a new light on the trivial details and comments of the earlier part. The story illustrates how in short fiction only the end makes what went before meaningful. Since the ultimate end is death, Gabriel’s awareness and acceptance of it is the ultimate epiphany, the sacred realization that transforms the trivial into the meaningful.

Conclusion

The first one hundred years of the short story divides into two almost equal periods: the movement from Romanticism to realism between 1820 and 1880 and the movement from realism to impressionism between 1880 and 1920. It is less a straight line of development from Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820) to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio than it is a one-hundred-year cycle, for it is a movement from the Romantic subjectifying of the old story form in the early part of the century to the realistic emphasis on objective reality in the latter part, and finally a return to the subjectifying of the objective world at the turn of the century. It is this return to Romanticism that marks the beginning of what is now known as modernism.

Bibliography

Bierce, Ambrose. “The Short Story.” In The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. New York: Gordian Press, 1966. Bierce criticizes William Dean Howells and the realistic school for their prosaic and pedestrian realism which fails to perceive the mystery of human life.

Current-García, Eugene. O. Henry: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Focuses on O. Henry’s frequent themes, his romanticism, and his narrative techniques, such as his use of the tall-tale conventions. Includes critical excerpts from discussions of O. Henry by other critics.

Davidson, Cathy N. The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Examines how Bierce blurs distinctions between external reality and imaginative reality in many of his most important short stories.

Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Discusses seven different short-story forms in Maupassant’s stories: linear, ironic coda, surprise-inversion, loop, descending helical, contrast, and sinusoidal. Discusses Maupassant’s influence on Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin, and Henry James.

Gerber, Philip. Willa Cather. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1995. Discusses the major themes of the experience of the artist and life in rural Nebraska in major Cather short stories.

Koloski, Bernard. Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. Discusses Chopin’s short stories in the context of her bilingual and bicultural imagination. Provides readings of her most important stories.

Marchalonis, Shirley, ed. Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. A collection of essays ranging from early reviews to a number of essays influential in starting a revival of interest in Freeman’s stories.