Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  What we have said of the successful short story—that everything in it must somehow work with everything else—seems to be the case too with the inseparable mixture of compatible aspects that somehow create the recognizable individual "world" of each of the major writers' whole body of work down through his career.

  Theme

  A writer, of course, is God in relation to the world he creates and is responsible not only for every sparrow's fall—for each character's fate—but is also responsible for the coherence of his world as a whole. This coherence in the world he creates is constituted of two concepts he holds, which may be in conflict: one is his world view, his sense of the way the world is; and the other is his sense of morality, his sense of the way the world ought to be.

  In some writers, the sense of morality predominates. Thus, it seems to me, Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, James, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Conrad, for instance, are writers who impose their own high code of right and wrong on the characters of their creation, "punishing" the characters' transgressions (which are of course also of the writer's own creation) with a Jehovah-like impartiality and harshness. In some other writers, the world view predominates. Thus, Melville, Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Hardy, for instance, seem to me to be writers who impose their dark sense of the way the world is on their characters, "punishing" them not out of any sense of the Tightness or wrongness of their acts, but rather according to the immutable laws of the world as they see it. The "punishment" meted out to two adulterous heroines may serve as an example: Anna Karenina suffers because Tolstoi is convinced of the immorality of her actions; Tess D'Urberville is sentenced by Hardy's conviction that the world "order" is cruelly indifferent and random.

  This distinction has some nice parallels—one is to a traditional dual role ascribed to art: to imitate life on the one hand, and to instruct on the other. Another parallel is to the role ascribed to God Himself: He has created this world and the people in it and all the things they do, good and evil, but He too seems torn between a sense of the way things ought to be and the way they are. Sympathy for the characters He created doesn't seem to enter into it all that much; for, except in the case of a miracle (which bears the same relation to life that the deus ex machina solution bears to literature—that is, it is a fault in the plotting), divine intervention is withheld, and the world is left to run pretty much by itself.

  In literature, the same is true. The writer's sense of the coherence of the world he has created is greater than any sympathy he may feel for the characters he has created. He has (and yet has not, in some strange way) the power to alter his characters' fate. How willful the great writers sometimes seem! Who has not wished that Hardy would let Tess and Angel have a bit of happiness at the end? Who hasn't wished that James would release Lambert Strether or Isabel Archer from their fine Jamesian conscience? Wished happiness and a large family to André and Natasha?

  In this foolish "wishing," the effects of the novel are a bit different from those of the drama. It would seem ludicrous to wish for Oedipus an escape from his own self-condemnation, or to wish Lear a happy old age bouncing Cordelia's babies on his knee. Part of the difference is in the stature and rigidity of the tragic figures; part of it is the way the authors of the great tragedies limit any sense of alternative to the characters themselves and never let the audience lose the sense of the inevitability of the catastrophe.

  Fiction, on the other hand, commonly brings us closer to the characters, who are in the first place people more approachable, more like us; and their fate is less symbolically ours (as in drama) than it is somehow actually ours, through that "wishing" involvement that anyone who has ever been engrossed by a novel must admit having experienced. To wish in this way for a "happy" outcome for the characters, when the author has prepared the book's coherence to demand their suffering, is of course to wish for the story to be spoiled, to wish for literature to become popular novel. The author deliberately makes us want for the characters what we know cannot be, what we know even ought not be. The novelist is constantly provoking in the reader the sense that "things might have been different" if only some twist or turn in the plot might have allowed it, or if the protagonist (or even some secondary character) might only have relented a little. The effect is a wrench on our sympathies—and we feel either a resentment (perhaps at first) that makes us ask, "Why did it have to be so?" or an acceptance (perhaps finally) that makes us say, "Yes, it had to be so," and then ponder the reasons. In either case, we readers turn back to the book for the reasons or answers.

  A book of this sort, when the last page is read, is not "finished." We have a sense of there being—or of there having been (it's nothing less than the metaphysics of the matter that's confusing tenses here)— more somehow. This more is sometimes spoken of as the book's "values," or its "meaning," or what the book "has to say." The most useful word, probably, is "theme." Clearly this overlaps with what we have been speaking of as the book's "world"—its imitation of the real world as colored and refracted by the author's sense of its coherence, the "order" that the author has made from the chaos that is real life.

  Thus it is that the fiction writer's method, in order to turn our attention to what it is he "has to say" about how the world is or ought to be, is deliberately to create in the reader suspense, involvement, and a developing understanding of and hence sympathy with the characters he created; and yet to be himself, finally, above that sympathy and, like God, ruthlessly true to the coherence of the world he has created, true to his theme.

  When we speak of the "world" of a great book like Middlemarch, we mean more than just the sociological world of shopkeepers, gentry, and professional men that George Eliot depicted. When we speak of the "world" of Moby Dick, we mean more than just the microcosm of the ship. We include in this the cosmic view and the ethical attitudes of the author who created it. Each great book will have a "world," but in those cases where we have several works by the same author and there is a degree of continuity between them, we have come to speak easily of the author's world. Thus, "the world of Dickens," "the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald," or "Hemingway's world." With Fitzgerald we mean more than just a world of richish people who drink too much—we mean a world where outcome depends on Fitzgerald's own sense of right and wrong and his sense of how the world works. It is the world, our world, everyone's world, seen through Fitzgerald's ethic as well as his eyes—as seen by (or through) his self. Hemingway's world is not just bullfighters and big game hunters worried about their bravery, it is a world in which "values" exist—even if they seem to consist in nothing more than an inside code of okay stoical behavior. These values in literature do not accumulate—literature is not philosophy—and may even be contradictory. One imagines, for instance, that what Henry James would consider "good" or "bad" behavior. Hemingway would consider to be fussy distinctions, and one is quite certain that James would consider Hemingway's self-testing heroes quite foolish. What matters is not what the values and themes are, but rather how they are integrated into the work. As Norman Mailer says of Hemingway, and of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and other such writers: "Everything they wrote was part of one continuing book—the book of their life and the vision of their existence."

  James Joyce spoke of the necessity for the artist to be wholly removed from his narrative, "behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." There is no real inconsistency here. The world Joyce created in his fictions (in Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses) is a world he created, after all. It was chosen by him, redrawn by him, colored by him; the characters speak and think in Joyce's language, and though it is made not to seem so, they do what he bids them. If he has "refined himself out of existence" in it, is it not still nevertheless his world?

  "Theme" and "world view" as an aspect of fiction seem to come very much after the fact. A beginning short story writer will have very little sense of any overall coherence in his efforts so far, and it's better that he doesn't. B
ut any editor or writing instructor who has read three or four first stories by a new writer may very well be able to find (if he but pause a few moments to consider them) a connective thread in the stories—whether in situation, milieu, characterization, or wherever. There is a special kind of thing the writer's doing, a kind of special way he has of looking at things, a kind of special thing that he sees, a kind of special cadence or odd conjunction in his writing—something about it that is just not standard or ordinary. This potential new vision-world-voice must certainly be an aspect of the work worth encouraging.

  And it may seem, too, that the short story provides less room for the flexing of self and vision-world-voice than does the novel. To some extent this is true. But there is no limit on the "size" of theme or subject, as such, in a short story. Any "limitations" are clearly not on the story's content, but on the author's self-expression. And excellence in art seems finally to be determined not by the extent the author expresses himself, but by the fineness of the created work, judged independently of the author.

  The Short Story and the New Criticism

  It is perhaps true, though, that many of the more established contemporary authors feel that they can't say all they have to say or express themselves in a short story the way they can in a novel or a piece of personal journalism. And many modern readers feel that a story fails to "move" them or "involve" them the way a novel does. The irony is that the American short story evolved in an aesthetic that denied the validity of both these complaints, an aesthetic that considered a work of literary art as more or less an independent object, and denied the relevance of its effectiveness as either an expression of the author or as a communication to the reader.

  This aesthetic was the so-called "New Criticism." It represented the main way literature was taught and thought about from the 1930s through the 1950s. Some feel that the intensive "internal analysis" methods of this school of criticism were developed to cope with the rich complexities of the fiction written after World War One. Others invidiously imply that the opposite was true: that much modern fiction was made deliberately ambiguous and intricate so as to be able to yield its meanings and subtleties only to the detailed readings and ingenious explications of the New Critic. At any rate, modern writing and modern criticism seemed made for one another. The short story, as a form, "yielded" to the New Criticism especially well.

  The New Criticism in its purest form aggressively considered art as object, and certain advantages and implications devolve from this. The really nifty questions in aesthetics—like "If a copy of Hamlet and a copy of a dreadful mystery novel are both on a desert island with no one to read them, is one still a better book than the other?" or James Joyce's "If a man hacking in anger at a piece of wood by accident carves out the image of a cow, can it be a work of art?"—all such metaphysical questions ultimately relate to the effect on the appreciator or to the intention of the creator in regard to an object of art.

  To consider the effect on the appreciator of the object as being the relevant question is to consider the story as a communication, which it is certainly possible to do. The only trouble is, this eventually leads to a vote-taking kind of aesthetic, bringing up questions like: how many people liked the story how much, and how qualified were they as readers, and so on. It all leads away from the story.

  Popularity doesn't seem to mean much, one way or the other. Northrop Frye has a useful example to show there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it: "Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a better dramatist; Keats was less popular than Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet." Frye goes on to say that "whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism." By "the publicity of criticism" he means the cumulative effect, down through the centuries, of reading literature as literature, considering art as art, instead of thinking of it as something else, as communication or expression.

  If you consider art as expression, then the relevant questions have to do with the intention of the creator, how the work of art relates to his life and thought, and to the period in which it was created, and so on. Again, these questions tend to lead away from the story, or did, in the obsessive "historical-biographical" way they were pursued prior to the introduction of the New Criticism. Considering art primarily as an expression of the artist was called "the intentional fallacy" by New Critics; as considering it as communication was called "the affective fallacy."

  So, but, if the only non-fallacious way to consider art is as object, the problem remains of demonstrating what is good, apart from the testimony of both reader and writer. This brings up objective qualities, as for instance, "unity," a quality which may be difficult (although actually not impossible) to demonstrate in some works (a Gothic cathedral, for instance, or Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra), but is certainly easily demonstrated in most well-wrought short stories. The short story as a form benefits especially from this sort of objective consideration; poetry and novels seem so much more direct communications of emotions to the reader, more effusive expressions of the author.

  Similarly, the short story yields well to the influential critical precepts of James Joyce, the Joycean aesthetics being a sort of romantic precursor of the academic New Criticism—so romantic, in fact, in the high-flying way Joyce has Stephen present them in Portrait of the Artist, that some doubt how seriously they are to be taken.

  In Portrait, Stephen flamboyantly interprets the three qualities Aquinas had said were necessary for art: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. The first he translates as "wholeness," by which he means the identity or separateness of the art object from the rest of the universe—thus it is to be considered apart from the perceiver and the creator. Consonantia, or "harmony," is the second requirement of art: "led by its formal lines, you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits ... You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious." Claritas, which Stephen translates as "radiance," is the "luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure" which is "called forth, prolonged, and at last resolved" by what Stephen calls "the rhythm of beauty": the "esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole, or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts, or any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part."

  Consideration of the relationship of parts to part, and of parts to whole, seems really, finally, the most reliable way to demonstrate the excellence of a work of art. A short story, for instance, considered as an object separate from the author and his intentions and separate from the reader and his reactions, is to be evaluated according to internal relationships, not external ones.

  This is not to say that one judges a story by the jigsawpuzzle ingenuity by which its parts are fitted to make its whole. A story is not constructed as a "pre-established design" to which all else is jointed. And no special premium is put on complexity of interrelationships between aspects of the story. The greatest literary works— Hamlet, Middlemarch, a first-rate story by Eudora Welty or Sherwood Anderson—will certainly have complexity. But I'm sure that there's also a lot of bad art with a great deal of complexity. A "simple" story may have a great fineness of construction that secures its excellence. The matter is not quantitative. Excellence depends on the kind of the interrelationships, on the "harmony" and effectiveness of them—not on their number. The interrelationships are to be analyzed, not counted.

  The assumption is, then, that excellence in fiction, or its opposite, can be demonstrated. Imagine that a reader has been pleased by a story, and since it pleased him he feels that "hence" it is a good story. This experience and conclusion are open to proof or disproof, depending on the reader and the story. If the reader was pleased by a bad story, it is possible to show him why it was bad, if he's willing to listen—which your average reader pleased by a bad story is unlikely to be. If he is pleased by a good story, it is equa
lly possible to prove to him that it was in fact good, and show him why it was good. This can be done only by showing him how harmoniously and effectively the parts of the story work together so as to create the story's excellence.

  By the careful reading and minute analysis which was characteristic of the New Criticism, every part can be shown to work with every other part in a successful short story. The parts are so interwrought that they are truly inseparable, and the seeming artificiality in the practice of separating the parts from one another and from the whole to discuss them, the theoretical impossibility of so doing, is just that: artificial and impossible. But to demonstrate the excellence of a story, one demonstrates not the separability of the aspects, but their very inseparability.

  We've already quoted Henry James on the way each aspect of fiction will serve several purposes. "People often talk of these things," he complains, "as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath, and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression." Then James goes on to say, in a famous passage:

  A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.