Novella

Introduction

The word “novella” comes from the Latin word novellus, a diminutive of the word novus, which means “new.” The term “novella” first became associated with the telling of stories in the thirteenth century with collections of newer versions of old saints’ tales, exempla, chivalric tales, and ribald stories. Eventually, the term became associated with tales that were fresh, strange, and unusual—stories, in short, that were worth the telling.

The most decisive historical event to establish the term “novella” as a designation for a new kind of fiction was Giovanni Boccaccio’s decision to give the name “novella” to the tales included in his Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620). What made Boccaccio’s stories new was their marking a shift from the sacred world of Dante’s “divine” comedy to the profane world of Boccaccio’s “human” comedy. The resulting realism of The Decameron should not be confused, however, with the realism developed by the eighteenth century novel. The focus in Boccaccio’s tales is not on a character presented in a similitude of everyday life but on the traditional world of story, in which characters serve primarily as “functions” of the tale.

With Miguel de Cervantes in the sixteenth century, as with Boccaccio before him, something new also characterized the novella. First, Cervantes, in his Novelas ejemplares (1613; Exemplary Novels, 1846), did not present himself as a collector of traditional tales but as an inventor of original stories. As a result, he became an observer and recorder of concrete details in the external world and a student of the psychology of individual characters. Although plot was still important, character became more developed than it was in The Decameron, and thus psychological motivation rather than story motivation was emphasized. Characters existed not solely for the roles they played in the stories but also for their own sake, as if they were real.

In Germany, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the novella began to detach itself from the notion of the form inspired by Boccaccio and Cervantes and became supported by a theory of its own. Friedrich von Schlegel agreed with the Renaissance idea that a novella was an anecdote that must be capable of arousing interest, but he noted that the modern retelling of already known traditional stories necessarily focuses the reader’s attention away from mythic authority and toward the authority of the subjective point of view of the narrator. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe added an important new element to the definition of the novella form by arguing that it depicted an unheard-of event that actually took place; thus, although the event can be accounted for by the laws of nature, it must be strange and unusual.

In addition to this theorizing about the novella, numerous examples of the form contributed to its development. The first such example is Goethe’s Novelle (1826; Novel, 1837), an exemplary story that dramatically changed the nature of the genre by shifting the focus from simple events to events that took on a symbolic meaning and form. After Goethe, the novella developed as a self-conscious genre, a sophisticated literary narrative that deals with the most basic metaphysical and aesthetic issues.

Whereas the logic of Goethe’s Novel is governed by the narrative demands of the story and by aesthetic artifice, the logic of the most famous novella of Ludwig Tieck, Der blonde Eckbert (in Volksmärchen, 1797, 3 volumes), follows the convention of the fairy tale as an externalization of unconscious processes. This act of grounding the supernatural in the psychological is taken to further extremes in the novellas of E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose stories are often self-conscious manipulations of the relationship between fantasy and the everyday that had previously been developed in the fairy-tale form. In Hoffmann’s best-known novella, Der Sandmann (1817; The Sandman, 1844), the protagonist is caught between fantasy and reality, a dichotomy that Hoffmann makes more explicit than does Goethe or Tieck. The advance of Hoffmann’s tale over those of his predecessors lies in its ironic tone, which parodies the romantic view of reality. Hoffmann has the ironic sensibility of Franz Kafka in perceiving that the supernatural world is serious and sardonic at the same time.

Although the term “novella” is used to refer to both the short pieces of fourteenth century fiction best exemplified by The Decameron and the highly developed nineteenth century German form, it was more often used in the twentieth century to refer to a number of works of midrange length, somewhat longer than the short story and somewhat shorter than the novel. The modern novella derives from various preexisting types. It began in the nineteenth century with a quasi-realistic normalizing of the old romance and parable forms and has maintained these romance conventions in such gothic novellas as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892), andHenry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). These conventions remain as well in such parabolic novellas as Gustave Flaubert’s La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, published in Trois Contes (1877; “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler,” in Three Tales, 1903), and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952).

Romance, realism, and the novella

It is not simply the gothic trappings and decorations that constitute the gothic novel, but rather the placing of characters into traditional romance tales and the resulting transformation of those characters into archetypes of the mythic story. The transformation of “real” people into parabolic figures by the latent thrust of the traditional romance story is characteristic of the novella form and can be seen in an explicit way in The Castle of Otranto, in which, even as characters act out their desires on the surface of the plot, desire becomes objectified and totally embodied in the latent and underlying plot.

In The Turn of the Screw, this basic combination is focused in a particularly explicit way, becoming the crux and central theme of the story. The issue of whether the ghosts in the story are real or are projections of the governess’s imagination is reflective of the basic problem of the novella form—that is, whether a given story features characters who are presented as if they are real or as embodiments of psychological archetypes. This ambiguity is so thorough in James’s novella that every detail can be read as evidence for both interpretations of reality at once.

Just as Walpole returned to the medieval romance for a model for his gothic tale, Flaubert returned to the medieval saint’s legend or folktale for the exemplar for “The Legend of St. Julian, Hospitaler.” Furthermore, just as Walpole’s romance differs from the medieval form by combining traditional story with psychologically real characters, so does Flaubert’s moral fable differ from its medieval source by self-consciously foregrounding 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 more particularly the generic means by which the medieval tale is moral and representative. The movement from the parable of Flaubert to the modern parables of O’Connor is a movement from a relatively simple story to a more complex and ironic form. Just as the narrative and symbolic aim of Flaubert’s story is the spiritual transformation of its central characters, so also is the central aim of O’Connor’s Wise Blood to lead its central character to a vision of his own fragmentation so he can be reborn.

Perhaps the two best-known modern parable forms of the novella are William Faulkner’s The Bear (1942) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952). These two stories differ from the parables of Flaubert and O’Connor in that they both seem to be less illustrations of moral issues than reenactments of primitive rituals that enforce the moral issue. Although they are quite different in their individual syntactical rhythms, both stories are characterized by a highly formal structure and style in which moral values evolve ritually from the hero’s encounter with the natural world. Of the two stories, The Old Man and the Sea seems closer to the parable form than does The Bear, primarily because of the conventional expectation that the parable is a relatively clean structural form, functional and bare in style and point of view.

One of the most common narrative devices of the novella is the convention of the Doppelgänger, or double. There are both historical and aesthetic reasons for the predominance of this motif in the form. Because the novella is a combination of the old romance form, in which characters are projections of psychic states, and the new realistic novel form, in which characters are presented as if they were real people with their own psychological lives, novellas often present both types of characters, especially in such works as Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (serial 1899, book 1902), in which the narrators seem to be realistic characters with individual psyches, while the central characters Bartleby and Kurtz seem to be manifested as psychological archetypes.

Perceiving reality to be a function more of mind than of external reality, nineteenth century fiction writers could present inner life by means of dreamlike romance projections. If, however, they wished to reveal the inner life in a realistic manner, yet avoid getting lost in a quagmire of introspection, the only answer was to present that subjective and often-forbidden side of the self in terms of external projections—as characters who, although the reader could respond to them as if they were separate external figures, were really projections of the mind of the protagonist. The most obvious means by which such an inner state could be projected as if it were outer reality was to present the projection as a figure somehow very much like the protagonist, not an identical double, but rather an embodiment of some hidden or neglected aspect of the self that had to be confronted and dealt with.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is perhaps the purest example of this use of the convention; that Dr. Jekyll represents the conventional and socially acceptable personality and Mr. Hyde the uninhibited and criminal self is the most obvious aspect of Stevenson’s novella. A more accomplished and subtle treatment of the convention can be seen in Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), for here the double is not merely a manifested hidden self or a figure imagined to be outside the protagonist, but rather an actual self whose crime is at the core of the moral issue facing the protagonist. Although it can be said that the double in “The Secret Sharer” represents some aspect of the captain’s personality that he must integrate, it is more probable that he is brought on board to make explicit and dramatically concrete the dual workings of the captain’s mind: He is distracted and split between his external responsibilities and his concealed secret.

Because of its moderate length, its highly formalized structure, and its focus on the ultimate metaphysical limitations of humanity, the novella has often been compared to classical tragedy. The central character of the novella often seems to be caught in the inevitability of fate or the story, being doomed at the same time as a victim of some limitation within the self. The essential issue is that the “tragic novella” creates the illusion that the characters are responsible for their own defeat, even though readers realize that they are witnessing the fatality demanded by the fable itself. The two most emphatic examples of this tragic form are Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” (1898) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine (1937).

The three basic devices in “The Blue Hotel” that give it a sense of classical tragedy are its formalized structure, which suggests a classical five-act tragedy; a central character neither eminently good nor evil, whose misfortune results not from vice or depravity but from some error, frailty, or limitation; and the creation through metaphor and allusion of the sense that the events and characters are not contemporary and real but archetypal and ritualistic. The most essential requirement is that the protagonist is made to seem responsible for his or her own downfall, even though that downfall is governed by the rules of the ritual or fable itself. Whereas the tragedy in “The Blue Hotel” is brought on by the protagonist’s mistake about the nature of the world around him, in Porter’s Noon Wine the downfall is brought on by a limitation in the protagonist’s ability to perceive himself. The tragic figure is Royal Earl Thompson; the other two figures, Helton and Hatch, are projections of two aspects of Thompson’s personality and situation. Helton makes it possible for him to live a lie about himself, and Hatch forces him to confront that lie.

One of the narrative forms that serves as an important antecedent to the modern novella is the fairy tale, for fairy-tale devices appear in the novella in various self-conscious ways: as a dreamlike state of being that is laid bare, as a structural device to develop a parabolic story, as the means to create the sense of metaphysical mystery in external reality, and as a way to suggest traditional character types and story situations. The fairy-tale conventions in the modern novella are never allowed to lapse into the marvelous and the supernatural; rather, they reflect the extraordinary nature of ordinary life, in which extreme situations seem to transform the world into a kind of reality akin to that found in fairy tales. Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (serial 1943, book 1951) and Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936) are two typical examples.

McCullers’s story seems to take place in the realm of dreams rather than in external reality, for it is a story turned inward on itself, narcissistic and grotesque just as the central figure Miss Amelia’s eyes are crossed, peering inward—sealed off from the ordinary world by the obsessions of the story itself. The effect of the work depends primarily on the poetic voice of the storyteller, which lyrically transforms the grotesque external reality into the inner story of the lover; the details of the story are thus transmuted by the teller until they bear no connection to the external world.

Perhaps the most successful example of this combination of fantasy and reality in the modern novella is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The extreme step Kafka takes is to make the transformation of the psychic into the physical the precipitating premise from which the rest of the 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 insect. Once the reader accepts this event, the rest of the story is quite prosaic and detailed, fully externalized in a realistic fashion. The Metamorphosis is an exemplar of the typical novella effort to present an inner state of reality as a fantastic but real outer event.

Metafiction

The most common theme and technique in the contemporary novella is metafictional self-reflexivity, embodied in stories that have to do with the nature of storytelling itself. Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), in which external reality and fictional reality become inextricably blurred as the central character tells a story about the almost mythical figure Anne Frank, is one example. Perhaps the most commercially successful attempt at this kind of self-reflexive fiction, however, is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969), which uses the popular science-fiction genre as a vehicle to explore methods of storytelling.

More sophisticated than Slaughterhouse-Five are the metafictional works of John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass. Barth’s “Dunyazadiad” (in Chimera, 1972) reflects his own fascination with the notion of characters in fiction becoming readers or authors of the very fiction they inhabit. “Dunyazadiad” takes its premise and its situation from the classic Scheherazade story, as told by her younger sister, Dunyazade. Barth transports a modern storyteller (himself) back to “Sherry’s” aid to supply her with the stories from the future that she has told in the fictional past.

Coover traces his debts back to Cervantes, who created a synthesis between poetic analogy and literal history and thus gave birth to the modern novel. Coover’s most popular novella, “The Babysitter” (in Pricksongs and Descants, 1969), is his most forthright example of this mixture of fantasy and reality. The story is a confused combination of the two realms in which, as is usual in the novella, unreality predominates over external reality. The story presents the fantasy reality in the same mode as external reality, so that in trying to unravel the two, the reader gets hopelessly lost in the mix.

Gass carries the self-reflexive mode to even further extremes. The primary premise of his novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), is that the book the reader holds in his or her hands is Willie Masters’s wife herself. This trope is carried out by such devices as varying the typography and the texture of the book pages and by using graphics and other purely physical devices to give readers the sense that they are not simply seeing through the medium of the book but are dealing with the medium itself.

The novella was not a popular form during the renaissance of the American short story in the 1980’s, stimulated by writers, including Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie, who practiced a cryptic and abbreviated narrative style notoriously known as minimalism or hyperrealism, the ultimate extreme of which was the short-short story, sometimes dubbed sudden fiction or flash fiction. So many writers tried to profit from the popularity of the trend that reviewers began to criticize the form for lacking any moral or social content. The backlash spawned a return to a more expansive, discursive writing style in the 1990’s, closer to the classic realism of the novel form.

Typical of this reaction against minimalism by a younger generation is Christopher Tilghman, whose debut collection, In a Father’s Place (1990), features stories that affirm such novelistic middle-class values as family, the land, and tradition. The novella-length title piece casually meanders through a story about a traditional patriarch who sends his son’s girlfriend away when she tries to convince her boyfriend to write a novel that “deconstructs” the family. Ethan Canin, who was first introduced to the public with his short-story collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), turned to the novella form with The Palace Thief (1994). Canin centers his title story on a teacher of ancient history, who retires from a private school after many years of teaching and tries to expose one of his former students, a powerful businessperson and politician who has become successful through cheating.

John Updike, one of the best-known practitioners of the often highly stylized stories that appeared in New Yorker magazine, began, in his later years, to write longer, more leisurely stories. “A Sandstone Farmhouse” (1990), the longest story in his 1994 collection The Afterlife, and Other Stories, is an understated, elegiac tale about a fifty-four-year-old man who must deal with his dead mother’s possessions. As he goes through her things, comparing his own transitory life in Manhattan to the solidity of the stone house where his mother lived, he discovers that although he moved to New York City to be where the action is, the real action has occurred in the farmhouse. Perhaps best known for his four Rabbit series novels, which were published between 1960 and 1990, Updike returned to the series in 2000 with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, “Rabbit Remembered.” Like The Afterlife, and Other Stories it shows the aftereffects of a death, as Rabbit’s family moves on without him.

The stories of Andre Dubus, a writer who refused to follow the minimalists, are based on the conviction that most human beings are seeking love rather than sex, relationships rather than one-night stands, and family rather than thrills. In the long title story of Dancing After Hours: Stories (1996), a forty-year-old female bartender who lives alone finds new hope when she meets a disabled man using a wheelchair, who lives life with gusto in spite of his disability. The novella-length title story of Andrea Barrett’s 1996 collection, Ship Fever, and Other Stories, takes place in the 1840’s when thousands of poor Irish fled the potato famine, only to land on the harsh shores of Nova Scotia plagued by typhus and other diseases. The protagonist is a young doctor from Quebec who volunteers to work at a quarantine station on Grosse Island. A powerful abbreviated historical novel, Ship Fever creates a fully realized world focused on a social disaster.

A number of writers who were part of the minimalist or hyperrealist trend of the 1980’s also published novellas afterward. Richard Ford’s Women with Men: Three Stories (1997) includes a novella told from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old Montana boy who travels with his aunt to visit his mother. In contrast to her earlier minimalist narratives, Ann Beattie’s later short fictions made more use of novelistic techniques of expanded character exploration and realistic, nonmetaphoric detail. In the novella-length title story of her Park City: New and Selected Stories (1998), the central character spends a week at a Utah ski resort during the off-season looking after her half sister’s daughter, trying to find new meaning in her life.

Alice Munro, a writer of short fiction who began publishing in the 1960’s, also began to write novella-length stories. The long title story of her collection The Love of a Good Woman: Stories (1998) begins in Wally, Ontario, a familiar Munro location, with three boys finding the body of the town’s optometrist in his car in the river. Although one might expect the plot to focus immediately on the mystery of the drowned man, Munro is in absolutely no hurry to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. She follows the three boys into their individual homes and leisurely explores their ordinary secrets.

Other collections of stories that featured novellas after the 1980’s include Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers (1997), which contains three novellas about her character Ruth Puttermesser; Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories (1997); and Saul Bellow’s The Actual, which was published separately as a novella in 1997. Story collections by Robert Stone—(Bear and His Daughter,1997)—and—Charles Baxter—(Believers, 1997) both feature novellas as their title stories. Other novellas by established writers include A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects: Two Novellas (1992), Stephen Dixon’s Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (1997), Richard Bausch’s Rare and Endangered Species (1994), Antonya Nelson’s Family Terrorists (1994), E. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997; in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999), Steve Martin’s Shopgirl (2000), Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002; children’s novella), and Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006).

David Leavitt, one of the best-known writers on the lives of young gays, published Arkansas: Three Novellas, in 1997. The most controversial tale of the three is “The Term Paper Artist,” in which a character named “David Leavitt” writes a term paper for a young, heterosexual male student in return for sex, after which he is pursued by a number of other straight male students with similar offers. In a short article on the novella, Leavitt wrote that if a novel is a marriage and the short story an affair, the novella is a “prolonged infatuation.”

Bibliography

Clements, Robert J., and Joseph Gibaldi. Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Relevant historical survey and analysis of the theory and practice of the Renaissance novella from Giovanni Boccaccio to Miguel de Cervantes. Argues that because the form was middle-class in orientation, most novellas are ironic, dealing with characters thought to be inferior in power or intelligence to the reader.

Good, Graham. “Notes on the Novella.” In The New Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994. Concise historical survey of the debate about the novella’s basic characteristics and its relation to the short story and the novel. Focuses on the implications of the form being an imitation of a live telling in which the end of the story is known by the teller at the beginning.

Lee, A. Robert, ed. The Modern American Novella. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Collection of essays by various critics on American novellas from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examines, for example, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and the novellas of J. D. Salinger and Saul Bellow.

Leibowitz, Judith. Narrative Purpose in the Novella. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1974. Focuses on the European and American novella from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1970’s. Argues that the generically distinct nature of the novella is its double effect of intensity and expansion. Contends that although the repetitive structure and theme complex of the novella may also be found in the short story and the novel, they do not operate in those forms as mutually dependent devices, as they do in the novella.

Plouffe, Bruce. The Post-war Novella in German Language Literature: An Analysis. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Discusses developments in the novella in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. Examines the “shared themes of uncertain existence and ambiguity of language” in the novella, the short story, and the Novelle.

Remak, Henry H. H. Structural Elements of the German Novella from Goethe to Thomas Mann. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Tests the three constituents of Goethe’s famous definition of the novella against his own novellas. Discusses his seminal role in the development of the novella as the supreme literary achievement of Germany in the nineteenth century.

Springer, Mary Doyle. Forms of the Modern Novella. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Using the rhetorical approach of the Chicago school of criticism, Springer discusses five types of novella plots: serious plot of character, degenerative tragedy, satire, apologue, and the example.