A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 104
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— — — . “ The Problem of Old Harjo . ” Southern
1973 .
Workman 36 ( 1907 ): 235 – 41 .
— — — . The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories .
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New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux , 1988 .
Indian Territory . ” Century Magazine 68 ( 1904 ):
— — — . A Friend of Kafka ’ s and Other Stories . New
178 – 81 .
York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux , 1970 .
The Multiethnic Story
481
— — — . Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories . New
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Viramontes , Helena Mar í a. The Moths and Other
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Stories . 1985. Houston : Arte P ú blico Press ,
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1995 .
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Wright , Richard . Eight Men
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:
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,
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31
“ Should I Stay or Should I Go? ”
American Restlessness and
the Short - Story Cycle
Jeff Birkenstein
When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted
with a single person.
– Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs , 2
I have come to think that the true history of life, is but a history of moments.
– Sherwood Anderson (qtd. in Chase, Sherwood Anderson 32)
Introduction
The mythological reasons for viewing America as a new Promised Land seem clear
enough. For centuries, people from around the world have come to America in
order to forge a new, if not a common, identity. For just as long, perhaps, settlers
have wondered if something better might yet be over the horizon. Indeed, this
confl icting impulse – whether or not to continue moving or to settle – has clouded
the American psyche from long before nationhood. When Massachusetts Colony
Governor John Winthrop said in 1630 that, “ [w]e shall be as a City upon a Hill
[and] the eyes of all people are upon us,
”
he believed that his new home was
securely removed from the ancient hierarchies – and violence and persecution – of
Europe. This mythology of security has been steadfastly pursued (as well as politi-
cized, corrupted, fetishized, etc.) ever since, even in the face of the decimation of
the native population and the importation of slaves from Africa. But as small
eastern settlements became villages and then cities, the old corrupting infl uences of
power and money naturally reemerged. Necessarily, then, the call of an idealized
frontier endured, for the “ old European idea of the frontier suggested something
heavy and permanent – a stone wall, a gun emplacement or a fortress, a range of
mountains meant to hold in check the movement of peoples and the passage of
time. But in the American West the frontier was always about the future ” (Lapham
The Short-Story Cycle
483
6). Over time, the struggle between a communal, urban dependence and a solitary,
frontier independence has developed into a signifi cant part of the national con-
sciousness, a shared “ American - ness. ” Even after Frederick Jackson Turner declared
the actual frontier closed in 1893, its siren call remained, infl uencing almost every-
thing in America, from capitalism to religion to America ’ s post Spanish - American
War colonial endeavors.
This confl ict, of course, also manifests itself in America
’
s literature. As many
critics have noted, the modern short story developed and fl ourished as a distinct
American genre. But history, like generic convention, is not stagnant:
“
Genre is
always the same and not the same, always old and new simultaneously ” (Bakhtin
87). In turn, the American short story has continued to evolve into still other related
(sub - )genres, from the short - story cycle to fl ash fi ction. Enjoying perhaps endless
permutations, the short - story cycle is inextricably interwoven into the ubiquitous
and internal American confl ict of wanting to, on the one hand, as Huckleberry Finn
does, “ light out for the Territory ” or, on the other, to put down roots. The American
short - story cycle, too, closely mirrors the development of the country. Frank O ’ Connor
observed some forty years ago that
“
America is largely populated by submerged
population groups ” (41), and whether it be socioeconomic status, or race, or a host
of other categories, such g
roups have long been a focus of the ever - developing short -
story cycle. As James Nagel notes, the contemporary cycle, 1 though largely critically
overlooked until a few decades ago (Forrest L. Ingram published the fi rst book
-
length study in 1971 ), is increasingly “ patently multicultural ” (Nagel, Contemporary
4 – 5); in conversation, J. Gerald Kennedy explains this as “ characters living on two
sides of the hyphen. ” Roc í o Davis concurs: “ the dynamics of the short - story cycle
have converted it into a form that is especially appropriate to the kinds of confl ict
presented in ethnic fi ction
”
(4). Generic development, as well as the peculiar
American tension between the impulse to stay or to move on, can be better under-
stood by briefl y looking at the genre ’ s history as well as more closely examining two
examples that span the genre, Sherwood Anderson
’
s genre
-
defi ning and much
-
discussed book
Winesburg, Ohio
(1919)
and Kelly Cherry
’
s excellent and critically
overlooked The Society of Friends (1999) .
A Brief History of the American Short - Story Cycle,
with Examples
A founding father of American literature, Washington Irving explored the peculiar
need for movement in American life. By adapting European folk tales and setting
them in America, he directed American literature away from Europe by largely reject-
ing the novel form and instead writing in a more episodic manner, which better
addressed the transitory urgency of life in America. Irving composed The Sketch Book
of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent ., perhaps his most famous work, as a cohesive series of stories
meant to be published together, though the stories were not intentionally connected,
484
Jeff Birkenstein
per se, like many cycles would later be. Due to fi nancial considerations The Sketch Book
was published serially from 1819 to 1820. Irving writes:
The following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed
but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before
I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal
to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or
numbers. (vii)
Of course, the genre of linked stories was not recognized critically at the time, but
Irving ’ s urge toward unifi cation in theme and intent is obvious.
Increasingly, the American short - story cycle is understood by a growing handful
of critics to exist not only in conjunction with, but independent of, other genres. As
genre serves “ essentially to establish a contract between writer and reader so as to
make certain relevant expectations operative ” (Culler 147), there remains much criti-
cal work to be done in this under - appreciated genre. In fact, its very existence often
remains suspect. For instance, in a recent book review, Thomas Mallon claims:
Even loyal visitors to the ever mossier precincts of literary fi ction tend to regard the
genre of “ linked stories ” with some suspicion. This polite publishers ’ label is often used
to camoufl age an unrealized novel, one that never exceeded the sum of its parts and had
to be disassembled, then salvaged as a collection of tales featuring the same hero or
heroine. (7)
Doubters notwithstanding, if the novel and the short story exist at opposite ends of
some kind of narrative prose continuum, clearly much vibrant literary space exists
between these bookends. For, as Nagel points out, many recent examples of the
genre were, upon their publication, misidentifi ed – by any one of a number of oth-
erwise sympathetic entities, including the publisher, the critics, and/or the readers
– usually as something approaching the “ superior ” form of the novel. 2 Setting aside
Poe ’ s artistic hierarchy (60), many critics have observed that the lamentable bias
toward the novel over the short story has long existed, even if, as Christina Nehring
argues, “ [t]here is no such thing as a higher genre or a lower genre in literature;
there is only good writing and bad writing, strong thinking and weak thinking ”
(83).
As for all genres, of course, the boundaries of the short - story cycle are, thankfully,
undulating and permeable. Perhaps it is not even possible, or desirable, to “ delimit
that corpus ” (Bal 3), thus dividing texts into this genre or that. Naturally, there is a
danger that “ as soon as the word ‘ genre ’ is sounded … a limit is drawn ” (Derrida 52);
however, that we lack a universal defi nition of the short - story cycle is an asset rather
than a liability and, moreover, merely a fact of generic convention. For instance, critics
have often described all of Faulkner ’ s works as one giant, interconnected community,
in and out of which Southerners continually and tragically march. Malcolm Cowley
The Short-Story Cycle
485
astutely observed – and, notably, Nagel records ( Contemporary 1) – that Faulkner ’ s
Knight ’ s Gambit , a collection of mystery tales, “ is, however, something more than a
mere collection. It belongs to a genre that Faulkner has made peculiarly his own …
a cycle of stories ” ( “ Faulkner ” 7). 3 About Winesburg, Ohio , Cowley has similarly argued:
“ In structure the book lies midway between the novel proper and the mere collection
of stories [that word again: “ mere ” ] … it is a cycle of stories with several unifying
elements, including a single background, a prevailing tone, and a central character ”
( “ Introduction ” 14). Whether or not Cowley ever connected these two reviews to each
other in print, it is interesting that he had similar defi nitions for a complete body of
work on the one hand and a single book on the other.
Like the skills necessary to survive the ever - changing American frontier, adaptation
has been the rule and not the exception for the American short - story cycle. Just as
genres bleed into one another so, too, do international infl uences. Indeed, the concept
of linking stories together to form a text greater than the whole extends back into
the antiquity of oral tradition. 4 Perhaps the fi rst important (that is, with lasting and
direct infl uence) modern example of the genre is Ivan Turgenev ’ s A Sportsman ’ s Notebook
(Russia, 1847 – 51), which moved the modern short - story cycle from the more com-
mercial enterprise of serial publication into a
“
formal exercise in arrangement
”
(Kennedy, “ From Anderson ’ s ” 195). 5 In turn, and to varying degrees, the structure
and style of this work infl uenced both Sherwood Anderson
’
s
Winesburg, Ohio and
Joyce ’ s Dubliners (1914), the two works still considered by most critics to be the
hallmarks of the genre. 6
Generally, American short - story cycles are book - length works that, by design, 7
create a larger community, when all the short stories therein – essentially, but not fully ,
autonomous 8 – are con
sidered. Robert Luscher writes that the genre is “ essentially a
hybrid resulting from the cross between the two prose genres that dominated nine-
teenth century fi ction[,] the novel and the short story ” ( “ Regional ” 2); authors employ
the genre, he argues, in order to represent “ spaces, both psychological and physical ”
( “ Discussion ” ).
A short story, Nadine Gordimer argues, is “ like the fl ash of fi refl ies, in and out,
now here, now there, in darkness ” (264); a “ discrete moment of truth is aimed at
– not the
moment of truth, because the short story doesn
’
t deal in cumulatives
”
(265). Gordimer means here a single fi refl y, a single story, but as anyone who has
lived in fi refl y country knows, they are rarely seen alone. After all, their light is a
mating tool that both attracts and competes with other fi refl ies. A short - story cycle,
then, may be likened to a fi eld of fi refl ies in the humid summer warmth at dusk.
Through progression and interconnection , the book - length “ story ” of the cycle transcends
individual story boundaries and becomes a whole text greater than the sum of its
parts. The short
-
story cycle maintains book
-
length continuity through one of a
variety of methods, including adapting or discarding such commonly used novelistic
strategies as character cohesion (i.e., having a central character or characters), main-
taining a central incident - based plot, and/or establishing temporal continuity, etc.
Conversely, the genre also builds on narrative strategies from the short story, a genre
486
Jeff Birkenstein
which often presents “ characters in their essential aloneness, not in their taken - for -
granted social world ” (May, “ Knowledge ” 137). However, while an individual char-
acter in a cycle may think that he or she is alone, the reader knows otherwise, because
this one story is then buttressed by a variety of others, a situation not available to
the autonomous short story.
Though not a particularly good piece of literature, an excellent illustrative example
of how the American short - story cycle represents a particular community as well as
perpetual American restlessness is Brander Matthews ’ s The Story of a Story and Other
Stories (1893) (though, as the name suggests, this cycle does not make up the entire