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THEORY OF THE SHORT STORY

THE SHORT STORY vs. THE NOVEL

AREAS OF FOCUS

Detail in the Short Story

• The short story has to be selective in deciding which details to use, and how to place them strategically within the story's frame - this makes it more effective b/c it does not have the luxury of time or space to contain all arbitrary details like the novel.
• Due to ltd. time frame of the short story, events & their order are chosen carefully. This results in a more concise form of literature.
• The short story concentrates on simplicity, while the novel stresses the application of complex additions.
• The short story is a single unit with fewer parts to modify, while the novel is constructed of episodes.
• There is a wide range of issues of key importance in the short story that are relevant to society; the novel concentrates on Romances.

Detail Continued

• Flannery O'Connor employs her own techniques; she creates a world with weight and extension through characters and actions.
• Circumstances and detail provide the reader with significant information to develop their own views. There are just enough gaps to provide mystery and leave the story open to interpretation.
• Flannery O'Connor uses details for the purpose of developing the story's meaning; the detail is not excessive, but necessary; it is not arbitrary, but rather works that expand meaning.

Time in the Short Story:

MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

• The reader does not often know what happened before or after an incident in the short story b/c time is ltd. Therefore, the reader is to focus on a single incident.
• This single incident is known as the 'moment of significance'. (ref)
• The 'moment of significance' makes the short story different from the novel. If written in the longer novel format, the moment of significance would be lost to the reader and obscure away from the true point of the story. To demonstrate this point, we'll look at the Alice Munro and Thomas King stories.

EXAMPLES OF:

MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

• In Alice Munro's "Shining Houses", the moment of significance is when Mary realizes that her neighbours don't care about Mrs Fullerton, or how long she has lived in their area. What they truly care about is appearance and property value - this symbolizes society's mentality of 'out with the old, and in with the new'.
• In Thomas King's "Borders", the moment of significance is when the mother and son finally cross the border on their Blackfoot citizenship, not American or Canadian. This example symbolizes the mother's pride in heritage and not in a country.

Time in the Short Story:

"LIGHT OF THE FLASH"& MODERNISM

• "Contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash…theirs is the art of the only think one can be sure of - the present moment (ref)."
• Novels are bound by form (chronology, narrative, etc.) - it is so consistent that it is not real; it cannot in this form convey what is real in human existence.
• Ultimate reality changes when viewed from different angles and at different moments - in short story, we get the consciousness of a single moment from a particular point of view.
• "Most short stories focus on single incidents. These incidents may be moments of discovery or realization, climactic moments, key episodes, and epiphanies. They are easily grasped by the reader and happen in a brief time span (ref)".

Time in the Short Story

JOYCE & MANSFIELD

• Joyce: Dubliners as a collection of stories that look at moments - we drop into a character's life, an epiphany occurs, and we drop out and move onto the next short story in the collection.
• EPIPHANY: "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself…the most delicate and evanescent of moments" (ref).
• The plot-less story - the trivial, the everyday events are what's real, focusing on these makes the short story alive to the reader.

JOYCE & MANSFIELD CONT.

• Subjectivity of this form - we get the story from the point of view of one character, or a select few characters. This includes use of free indirect discourse where we see the characters are thinking, and how their train of thought is working through that exact moment.
• Subjectivity brings about the idea that we may not be getting the whole truth…therefore, how much can we infer? "Joyce presents in Dubliners a strong sense of the indeterminacy of human experience and the relativity of the truth" (ref).

Approach to Character

• Character can either be treated as a component of a story, or it can be the vehicle for the theme. B/c of the constraints of a short story, character is often given the most attention.
• Character can be examined from many different angles, and a lifetime can be alluded to.
• D.H. Lawrence saw character as something beyond a sml component of a story.
• "there is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable…Don't look for the development of the novel [in this case, story] to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form".

Character cont.

• Katherine Mansfield seems to disagree with Lawrence, thinking that character is not extremely important.
• "The short story, by reason of its aesthetics, is not, and is not intended to be, the medium either for the exploration or long-term development of character. Character cannot be more than shown - it is there for use, the use is dramatic. Foreshortening is not only unavoidable, it is right".

The Male & Female Writer:

DETAIL

• Time in the short story is limited, and details used in this time are of key importance. Detail can also be used to identify the different styles of masculine and feminine writing in the short story as opposed to the different gender writing in the novel.
• Time cannot be wasted on developing details so that female and male writing styles are drawn out slowly as the story progresses. Instead, it is often evident from the very beginning that a man or woman wrote the story. We will look at Poe and Mansfield for examples on this.
• Although detail is important to both the male and female author, feminine writing tends to have more delicate descriptions, while male writing has a more aggressive stance. We will once again compare Poe's and Mansfield's stories, and take a look at Macleod's story.

Male and Female Writing:

FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE

• The use of free indirect discourse - "a third-person narrator's voice blended with that of a dramatized character so that the narrator appeared to merge into the text and to relinquish responsibility for it" (Hanson, 1) - is attributable to the short story, and is primarily used by female writers (this is not the case for every story, however).
• Author Clare Hanson relates that "Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were among the first to develop, initially in their short story fiction, the 'indirect free style' of narration" (Hanson, 56)
• "it can be argued that, in general, women tend to have more immediate access than men to 'inner speech', as opposed to outer socialized speech" (Hanson, 66). Therefore, b/c free indirect discourse mixes this inner speech with third person narration, one could associate a female's 'immediate access' with free indirect discourse as well.

THE END

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