JOLLY DAYS

To Refuse to Condemn and Refuse to Celebrate

Here is a really terrific article about short stories. The reason it is so good is that the author (William Boyd) is a writer rather than a theorist. His insights into Checkhov's greatness are illuminating — it is like having an expert guide along on a trail you thought you knew.

…Updike has said: “More closely than my novels … these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life's incidents, predicaments, crises, joys.”

Angus Wilson observed that, “Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for development backwards.” All things to all writers, then: the quotidian epiphanic moment, the submerged autobiography, a question of structure and direction…

Because anyone involved in the arts is intensely analytical — pragmatically analytical — Boyd takes a shot with his own classifications:

1 The event-plot story … distinguish[es] Chekhov's stories from everything that preceded him. Up until Chekhov, all short stories, virtually without exception, were event-plot ones. In these stories the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end. The revolution that Chekhov set in train - and which reverberates still today - was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless.

2 The Chekhovian story Chekhov is the father of the modern short story and his influence is still massive and everywhere…What is the essence of the Chekhovian short story? Chekhov wrote to a friend that, “It was time writers, especially those who are artists, recognised that there is no making out anything in this world.” I would say that the Chekhovian point of view is to look at life in all its banality and all its tragic comedy and refuse to make a judgment. To refuse to condemn and refuse to celebrate…[Chekhov's] famous retort when he was asked to define life. “You ask me what is life? That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that's all there is to it.”

3 The 'Modernist' story I choose this title to introduce the other giant presence in the modern short story - Ernest Hemingway. I use the term to convey the idea of obscurity and deliberate difficulty. Hemingway's most obvious revolutionary contribution to the short story was his style: pared down, laconic, unafraid to repeat the most common adjectives rather than reach for a synonym. But his other great donation was a purposeful opacity…somehow Hemingway invests this story and the others with all the covert complexities of an obscure modernist poem. You know there are hidden meanings here and it is the inaccessibility of the subtext that makes the story so memorable. Wilful obscurity in the short story works: over the length of a novel it can be very tiresome. This idea of modernist obscurity overlaps with the next category.

4 The cryptic/ludic story Here the story presents its baffling surface more overtly as a kind of challenge to the reader - Borges and Vladimir Nabokov spring immediately to mind. In these stories there is a meaning to be discovered and deciphered…dig deep and you will discover more, is the implied message. Try harder and you'll be rewarded: the reader is on his mettle. One of the great cryptic short story writers is Rudyard Kipling, something of an unacknowledged genius of “suppressed narration”, as it is sometimes known…

5 The mini-novel story…something of a hybrid - half novel, half short story - trying to achieve in a few dozen pages what the novel achieves in a few hundred: a large cast of characters, lots of realistic detail…All the matter of a Victorian three-decker is somehow compressed into its 50 or so pages. These stories tend to be very long, almost becoming novellas, but their ambition is clear. They eschew ellipsis and allusion for an aggregation of solid fact, as if the story wants to say, “See: you don't need 400 pages to paint a portrait of society.”

6 The poetic/mythic story…riffs on inner space and the long prose-poems…This is the short story-quasi-poem and it can range from stream-of-consciousness to the impenetrably gnomic.

7 The biographical story…the short story deliberately borrowing and replicating the properties of non-fiction: of history, of reportage, of the memoir. Borges's stories play with this technique regularly. The overweening love of footnotes and bibliographical annotation in younger contemporary American writers is a similar example of the genre (or to be more precise, they represent a hybrid of the modernist story and the biographical). Another variation is to introduce the fictive into the lives of real people…to capture the strengths of fiction and the non-fictional account simultaneously.

Because I have quoted so extensively, here is a plug for the guy, a book I haven't read, but you can tell from the piece that this is a smart talented writer:

Fascination by William Boyd