Size Matters

The declining popularity of the short story has provoked innumerable debates regarding both its purpose and its relevance in post-twentieth century literature. One could look at the dropping sales and narrow readership of short literary fiction, and conclude that the genre is missing something.

While its combination of drama and brevity has salvaged it from the throes of extinction time and time again, the short story’s tenuous status alongside more popular manifestations of fiction writing (i.e. genre—or “pop”—fiction) is a matter over which much time and speculation has been sacrificed. After all, where is the short story going? Does anyone intend to take it there? And, perhaps most importantly, who is it that actually cares to see it continue?

In any case, it would go without saying that one of the central objectives of modern fiction is to graft the imagined onto the experienced, or to reprocess reality imaginatively while retaining its authenticity. But do readers actually read for reality? Maybe an authentic interpretation of the human condition holds less appeal than a formulaic romance incorporating every element of Freytag’s Pyramid; and in that case, the short story ought to devote less time addressing the human condition and more time addressing a specific audience.

In its early days in the capable hands of writers the likes of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant, the short story encountered a great deal of success. But beyond the more obvious criteria (length, for example), stories like “The Necklace” or “The Gift of the Magi” contain relatively few differences from their lengthier cousins.

Outfitted with radically condensed beginnings, middles and ends, the short story could be entertaining and yet simultaneously didactic. Many nineteenth-century writers summarized vast amounts of time and space, resolving their stories with universally applicable morals, more or less in the manner of a fable or a parable.

In the late nineteenth century, well before the First World War and the artistic contributions of the “Lost Generation”, writers like Anton Chekhov instigated trends that would later produce substantial changes in the way that modernist writers portrayed human thought and expression. The idea of relying on subtext—rather than explicit exposition or lengthy explanations—to custom-construct an entirely believable hypothetical reality in which characters thought, spoke and interacted as naturally and ordinarily as if they were real themselves, was a daring novelty in stark contrast with literary precedent.

What Chekhov ultimately succeeded in doing was beginning a literary trend in which short stories could develop recklessly and in multiple directions. The traditionally-accepted phases of plot and narrative structure, in many cases, were narrow and, as such, limiting. Much of what occurs in the life of any given individual—particularly in the event that that individual narrates his own experience—contains exclusive, mysterious elements, simply by virtue of the fact that few people consider their own actions objectively. But fiction that imitates reality relies heavily on exclusionary tactics, omitting expositions or resolutions, so that it can be more accurately portray reality. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, lifelike fiction was both too challenging and too progressive to overlook.

For instance, Georg Büchner’s stage play Woyzeck—generally referred to as one of the pioneering modernist artistic ventures—was first staged in 1913 (and first published, posthumously, in 1879). It briefly depicts the story of a proletarian protagonist confronted with numerous social injustices, who eventually resolves to kill his common-law wife and himself following a series of events culminating in his descent into madness. The story closely parallels the real life incident of a working-class murder that occurred earlier in the nineteenth century. In that respect, Woyzeck is one of the earliest modern works to rely on the notion of verisimilitude in crafting a hyperrealistic setting with credible characters, plot devices and outcomes.

This same idea of verisimilitude reappears in the work of Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories chronicling the experiences of a few soldiers involved in the Vietnam War. Its evolution and recurrence in the one-hundred-year gap between the lifetimes of Büchner and O’Brien is indicative of its popularity in the twentieth century.

Likewise, contemporary magical realism in literary fiction has its own earlier iterations. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka juxtaposes the fantastic alongside the mundane in much the same fashion as contemporary writers like Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The depiction of grotesque or sensationalized realism, additionally, appears in the works of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and other prominent Southern Gothic writers of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway’s curt prose characterizes his fragmented stories, often involving nameless characters in the midst of unremarkable situations, whose brief interludes of detached second-person narration only underscore the dull reality of the settings and the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Largely autobiographical works, like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, maintain this same dedication to the faithful portrayal of reality. Jack Kerouac’s novels provide similar examples of the way in which the roman à clef was used to generate the illusion of authenticity, especially given the stream-of-consciousness style of its narration.

But the question of the short story’s durability is one which remains the subject of careful scrutiny. Whether the role of the artist is to produce art for other artists, to write stories for other writers, or to invent parallel realities for the sake of reality is a puzzling concept to take into consideration. In the golden age of short stories—if there ever even was a golden age of short stories—it would seem that the diversity of the audience, at the very least, would equate the diversity of the product. The reality, however, is vastly different.

With so many people writing and so few people reading, summoning any sort of optimism for the future of the short story is by no means a small order. Conveying abstruse, often multi-faceted themes in a matter of seven to twenty pages is a challenge for a writer; but, for a reader, it presents itself as more of an unwelcome, unsolicited exercise. Reality is a fabulous starting point, but the banalities of daily life are more excruciating than entertaining. So if the short story intends to survive in a world in which writers significantly outnumber readers, then its options are limited. Either it can address the priorities of its audience (entertainment), or it can exist. Unread.