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they had no success. I found that really: short stories were much
better. 1
Pritchett's 'fundamental view about the short story is that it
begins as a poetic insight, and ... is ... a way of seeing through
a situation.' 2 This insight is typically immediate and, as John Wain
points out, the decision to use it as a short story is instantaneous:
'Between thinking [that it sounded like an idea for a short story]
and making a decision was a microsecond.' 3 This determination of
form seems to predate conscious decision. Unlike the instantaneous
insight constituting the germ of the short story, the idea for a novel
seems to come as a sense of unease, of shifting balance, that can
be righted only by full exposition and discovery. Margaret Drabble
says that her novels 'seem to grow out of a set of related ideas. If
they relate themselves enough, they turn into a novel. I very rarely
begin with a character, with a predicament more.' 4 There is a sense
of exploration that may be at bottom a personal search: Erica Jong
says 'there is something about the process of writing a novel that is
incredibly revealing about one's own motivations. It's a kind of
mediation, a tremendous revelation of self. I don't think I could
live without writing novels any more; it's become an inner need.' 5
Writing a novel seems to involve a kind of personal growth. In her
introduction to the second edition of The Golden Notebook, Doris
Lessing describes what she learned while she was writing the
novel: 'Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations
for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it.
All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn't recognize as mine
emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then, and not
only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really
traumatic: it changed me' (p. x). These observations by practising
novelists emphasise the sense of the novel as process, as gradual
discovery rather than instantaneous perception.
There is a further point about the writer's relation to the novel
that bears on the present discussion. The writer's memory of the
text already completed may be less accurate than a reader's. One
has to make so many choices of alternative situations, of details,
that a writer may remember the range of options rather than the
final choice. It is a common observation that the novel gives more
scope for digression and exploration of side issues. All this means
that the writer may in fact be able to exert better control over a
short story: it can remain in the mind as a single unit, 'the fruit of
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essential nature of the short story and evolution for the novel. The
difference can perhaps be put in better focus by a consideration of
conclusions. Gerlach says 'the short story is that genre in which
the anticipation of the ending is always present' 13; because the
story's relation to the life of the character is essentially metaphoric,
implying a future as well as a past for most even if not for Francis
Macomber, the story can simply stop. But, says E. M. Forster,
'Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. If it was not for death and
marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude.'
Since 1928 there have been some ingenious ways to avoid these
typical plot endings: Woolf brings Orlando up to the present
moment; echoing Mrs Dalloway, Drabble ends The Middle Ground
by leaving Kate just as her party is about to begin; Lessing returns
us to the beginning of The Golden Notebook much as Joyce did
Finnegan's Wake, while she takes The Four-Gated City into the future.
All these endings stress the continuity, the on-going process of
life, the life in time, just as did George Eliot when she closed
Middlemarch with a lament at leaving her characters: 'For the
fragment of life, however typical, is not the sample of an even
web.' 14
Clearly then, the difference in the relations of the two forms to
time which first shows in the ways the short story writer and the
novelist conceive their subjects - the words revelation and evolution
describe these ways quite as much as they describe the short stories
and novels- is manifest in their structures. (This is obviously a
spatial word, but the narrow associations plot has acquired during
its long history render it useless in this context.) Indeed, it is in
the structures that readers first notice the different relations to
time, which, because it is 'the great invisible in our midst' we can
know only by its effects. Although first manifest in the structures,
the effects of the different relations to time do not end there. We
have already seen that the short story's special relation to time
influences theme. It also has profound implications for characterisation.
Scholes and Kellogg hypothesise that characterisation by evolution (what they call'chronological, in which the character's personal
traits are ramified so as to make more significant the gradual shifts
worked in the character during a plot which has a temporal basis
[)] . . . is perhaps the principal distinguishing feature of the
novel'. 15 Forster's celebrated distinction between flat and round
characters is based on precisely this assumption about the nature of
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Thus, unlike novelists who, the old maxim goes, must know
everything about their characters, short story writers need only
enough details to suggest the main outlines, indeed, if they know
more, must rigorously select. The need to present only the essential,
permanent features of a character in a characteristic moment means
that context in a short story depends to a large extent on what the
reader can supply. Typically it is evoked through various kinds of
suggestion, such as allusion or metaphor. The short story therefore
tends to be doubly symbolic, first in its relation to time with the
central event representing the whole life, and second in its
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usefulness of this image has not been lost on short story writers:
Lionel Trilling's 'Of That Time, of That Place' uses photographs as
a way of recording character and Ruth Suckow's 'Four Generations'
successfully uses a family portrait as a structuring metaphor much
as Joyce uses the chalice and Oates uses the carcinoma. However,
I am not offering 'photo is to short story as film is to novel' as an
exact equation: the short story loses more in the translation to film
than the novel does. Providing visual equivalents for the words of
a short story ties them too tightly to the literal referent so that the
resonance William Sansom sees as necessary for the short story18 is
stilled, the larger context of metaphorical extensions within which
it exists cut away, and the story diminished.
Structure, theme, characterisation, language - all the elements
of the short story are influenced by its particular relation to time.
Heather McClave maintains that this relation determines the
essence of the form. 'The short story ... embodies the completed
moment: immediate, self-contained, isolated from a causal chain
of events - much like the modern image of consciousness itself'. 19
We are now less certain of rationality, more tentative of the
principle of cause and effect; less sure that science, whether
physical or social, can lead us into a better world; more suspicious
of linearity, even - although writers cannot afford to indulge in
too many doubts about their medium regardless of how many they
entertain about the nature of existence - of language itself. The
moment of revelation that stands at the heart of the short story,
that moment of insight that comes before language, constitutes a
discrete moment of certainty in a nebulous universe.
Notes
1. Ben Forkner and Philippe Sejourne, 'An Interview with V. S.
Pritchett', Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 6 (1986) p. 25.
2. Ibid., p. 23.
3. John Wain, 'Remarks on the Short Story', Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle:
Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 2 (1984) p. 73.
4. Gillian Parker and Janet Todd, 'Margaret Drabble', Women Writers
Talking, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983) p. 168.
5. Wendy Martin, 'Erica Jong', Women Writers Talking, p. 24.
6. Walter Allen, The Short Story in English (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1981) p. 7.
7. John Gerlach, Towards the End (University of Alabama Press, 1985)
p. 108.
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