There must be more difficult questions than “What makes a short story?”
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? What does a woman want? What is love? What walks on four legs at dawn, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Where is fancy bred: in the heart or in the head?
Yet all of these seemingly impossible questions are, in fact, far easier to address than the deceptively straightforward matter of what constitutes the short story. For all of these classic puzzlers—except for the Sphinx’s riddle—suggest variant solutions and multiple possibilities, invite expansion and rumination. Whereas any attempt to establish the identifying characteristics of the short story seems to require a narrowing, a winnowing, a definition by exclusion. A short story is probably this—but definitely not that.
The real problem is that the most obvious answer is the most correct. We know what a short story is: a work of fiction of a certain length, a length with apparently no minimum. An increasing number of anthologies feature stories of no more than a page, or a single flashy paragraph, and one of the most powerful stories in all of literature, Isaac Babel’s “Crossing into Poland,” at less than three pages long, is capacious enough to include a massive and chaotic military campaign, a soldier’s night of troubled dreams, and the report of a brutal murder.
But after a certain point (to be on the safe side, let’s say seventy or eighty pages, though one short story theoretician has argued that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—not one word more or less—defines the outer limits of the form) the extended short story begins to infringe on novella territory.
Lacking anything clearer or more definitive than these vague mumblings about size, we imagine that we can begin to define the short story by distinguishing it from other forms of fiction, by explaining why it is not a sketch, a fairy tale, or a myth.
And yet some of our favorite stories seem a lot like the sort of casual anecdote we might hear a friend tell at a dinner party. Somerset Maugham claimed that many of Chekhov’s stories were anecdotes and not proper stories at all. (“If you try to tell one of his stories you will find that there is nothing to tell. The anecdote, stripped of its trimmings, is insignificant and often inane. It was grand for people who wanted to write a story and couldn’t think of a plot to discover that you could very well manage without one.”) And just to confuse things further, many fairy tales—the best of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm—are as carefully constructed, as densely layered, as elaborately crafted as the stories (or are they tales?) of Hawthorne and Poe.
Why do we feel so certain that a masterpiece such as Tolstoy’s “The Three Hermits” is a short story, though it so clearly bears the stamp of its origins in “an old legend current in the Volga district,” and though its structure has more in common with the shaggy-dog story than with the artful, nuanced studies of Henry James? In fact, James insisted, a short story “must be an idea—it can’t be a ‘story’ in the vulgar sense of the word. It must be a picture; it must illustrate something . . . something of the real essence of the subject.”
Just to take on James, let’s look at “The Three Hermits,” which could hardly be more of a “story,” in the most unashamedly “vulgar sense of the word.” The protagonist, if we can call him that—we know nothing about his background or the subtler depths of his character, absolutely nothing, in short, except that he is a bishop of the Orthodox Church—is traveling on a ship that passes near an island on which, he hears, live three monks who spend their lives in prayer. The bishop insists on being ferried to the island, where he meets the hermits, again described with a minimum of the sort of physical and psychological description that, we have been taught, is essential for fiction in general and for the short story in particular. One of the monks is tall, “with a piece of matting tied around his waist”; the second is shorter, in a “tattered peasant coat”; and the third is very old and “bent with age and wearing an old cassock.” To his horror, the bishop discovers that the hermits have their own way of praying (“Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us”) and have never heard of the Lord’s Prayer.
The bulk of the story, the shaggy-dog part, concerns the bishop’s efforts to teach these comically slow learners how to pray correctly—a task that consumes the entire day and is completed, more or less, to the visitor’s satisfaction. That night, as the bishop is sailing away from the island, he sees a light skimming toward him across the water. “Was it a seagull, or the little gleaming sail of some small boat?” No, in fact, the radiance is an aura surrounding the hermits, flying hand in hand over the water, desperately chasing the bishop’s boat because they have forgotten what they learned from the church official, who—educated at last—tells them, “It is not for me to teach you. Pray for us sinners.”
Even in summary, this story retains some of its power to astonish and move us, and yet the full effect of reading the work in its entirety is all but lost. Which brings us to one of the few things that can be said about the short story: Like all great works of art, it cannot be summarized or reduced without sacrificing the qualities that distinguish an amusing dinner party anecdote from a great work of art—depth, resonance, harmony, plus all the less quantifiable marks of artistic creation. This is especially true of stories in which the plotline is not so clear, so succinct, so distilled to its folkloric essentials, and of writers who achieve their effects almost entirely by the use of tone, by the accretion of minute detail, and by the precise use of language.
What can we conclude about Turgenev’s “Bezhin Meadow” when we hear that it concerns a few hours that the narrator spent among a group of peasant boys who scare themselves and one another by telling ghost stories? At the end of the story, we learn—in a sort of brief epilogue—that one of the boys was killed a short time after that evening on the meadow. When we hear it summarized, the plot seems sketchy and indistinct. Why is this not a vignette or a “mood piece”? But when we read the story itself—a work of art that feels utterly complete and in which every sentence and phrase contributes to the whole—we are certain that it is indeed a story. We cannot imagine anything that needs to be added or omitted.
What remains of the humor and breathtaking originality of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” when we describe it as a story about two childlike (but in fact adult) sisters attempting to get through the days following the death of their father? What survives of the many small gestures and lines of deceptively whimsical dialogue that lead us to understand that the distribution of power between the more “grown-up,” sensible Josephine and the fanciful, impulsive, skittish Constantia is the same as it must have been in early childhood? In summary, what remains of Josephine’s certainty that their dead father is hiding in his chest of drawers, or of his former nurse’s—Nurse Andrew’s—upsetting, “simply fearful” greed for butter, or of the “white, terrified” blancmange that the cook sets on the table, or of the final, elliptical moment in which we observe the sisters’ forgetfulness—an ending that makes us understand the tragic cost of remembering?
It is hard to recognize Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” from the following description: A jaded womanizer falls deeply in love, despite himself and for the first time, and in the course of that love affair discovers that his whole world—that he himself—has changed. How sentimental and obvious it sounds, how romantic and unconvincing. Yet when we read the story, we feel that it is of enormous, immeasurable consequence and resonance, and that it tells us all we need to know about Gurov and Anna’s whole lives. We feel that the story’s details—the slice of watermelon in the hotel room, the description of Gurov’s wife’s eyebrows—are as important as its “action,” and that if we left out these details, the perfect but somehow fragile architecture of the story would crumble.
Not much remains of the short story retold in summary—but not nothing. For this also can be said of the short story: if we find a way to describe what the story is really about, not its plot but its essence, what small or large part of life that has managed to translate onto the page, there is always something there—enough to engage us and pique our interest.
But isn’t the same true of novels? What do we lose when we try to explain what Mrs. Dalloway is about? Or when we become hopelessly mired in the tangles—of lovers, generations, narrators, stories within stories, frames within frames—in Wuthering Heights? Or when we say that we just read the most harrowing novel about a provincial French housewife whose life is ruined by her impractical fantasies of love and romance? The answer’s the same: nearly everything, though some “germ” (to quote James again) stays ineradicably present.
One distinction often made between the short story and the novel is that the short story more often works by implication, by indirection, that it more frequently achieves its results by what has not been said or what has been left out. But while certain stories do function this way—the situation that has come between the lovers in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is never directly mentioned in the course of their painful conversation—it is also true that in the greatest works of fiction, regardless of their length, every line tells us more than it appears to communicate on the surface. So, even in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, each seemingly insignificant phrase and incident assumes additional meaning and resonance as the book progresses; every incident and minor exchange takes on a significance that we cannot apprehend until we go back and reread the whole. In fact, the best way to read—the way that teaches us most about what a great writer does, and what we should be doing—is to take a story apart (line by line, word by word) the way a mechanic takes apart an automobile engine, and to ask ourselves how each word, each phrase, and each sentence contributes to the entirety.
In their efforts to define the formal qualities of the short story form, critics are often driven to invoke basic Aristotelian principles (short stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end) and to quote the early masters of the genre, writers who must have had a more sharply focused view of the new frontier toward which they were heading. This is why introductions to anthologies, textbook chapters, and surveys of the latest developments in the academic field of “short story theory” are all fond of invoking Edgar Allan Poe’s notion of the “single effect”:
A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. . . . In the whole composition, there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable to the novel.
More recent—and also frequently quoted—is V. S. Pritchett’s characteristically elegant and incisive formulation: “The novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely. . . . It is, as some have said, a ‘glimpse through,’ resembling a painting or even a song which we can take in at once, yet bring the recesses and contours of larger experience to the mind.”
No sensible reader could argue with Pritchett or Poe. But then again, few readers could explain exactly what “a single effect” is, or what, precisely, is the “one thing” that our favorite short story is telling us. Indeed, the minute one tries to make any sweeping declarations about the limitations or boundaries of the short story, one thinks of an example—a masterpiece!—that embodies the very opposite of the rule that one has just proposed. So let’s take just a few of the many assumptions that the casual reader—or the student hungry for some definitive parameters—might make about the short story.
One might assume that for reasons of economy or artistic harmony, the short story should limit itself to depicting the situation of a main protagonist, or at least a somewhat restricted—manageable—cast of characters. And many stories do. There are only three major characters—the narrator, his wife, and the blind man—in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” And only one character, really, in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” we have the overbearing, heartbreaking mother and her snobbish, long-suffering son, Julian. And in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator and Sonny are the big moon around whom the others—Isabel, the mother and father, the other musicians—revolve.
But who, one might ask, is the “big moon” in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” or in Chekhov’s own “In the Ravine,” a story that focuses not on any central character but on the life of an entire community, Ukleevo, a village that “was never free from fever, and there was boggy mud there even in the summer, especially under the fences over which hung old willow-trees that gave deep shade. Here there was always a smell from the factory refuse and the acetic acid which was used in the finishing of the cotton print.” In this polluted and horrifically corrupt little hamlet, the most powerful family—a clan of shopkeepers—devote themselves to lying and cheating their neighbors; their dishonesty and general depravity are repaid, eventually, by heartbreak and ruin.
The story does have a villain, Aksinya, and a heroine, the peasant girl Lipa, who does not appear until quite a few pages into the story. Nonetheless, we feel that Chekhov is less interested in depicting particular destinies than in painting a broader picture. The story is the literary equivalent of a monumental canvas, crowded with figures: Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, for example.
But even the story that lacks a central character should, presumably, limit itself to a single point of view, a controlling intelligence that guides us through the narrative. Or should it? Once more the answer seems to be: not necessarily. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Carver’s “Cathedral,” and John Updike’s “A & P” are examples of short fictions that stay fixedly within the consciousness of their narrators. Kafka’s “The Judgment” adheres more or less faithfully to the close-third-person viewpoint through which we observe the tormented last hours of Georg Bendemann.
Yet another of Kafka’s stories—The Metamorphosis—also begins in the close third person, with the understandable astonishment of Gregor Samsa, who has just woken in his bed to find that he has been transformed, overnight, into a giant insect. And there the story remains until the narrative must leave the room in which Gregor is imprisoned in order to follow the action in the other parts of the apartment and chart the effects that his transformation has had on his family. Finally, after Gregor’s death, the story can—for obvious reasons—no longer be told from his point of view, and a more detached omniscience describes the process by which his parents and his sister recover and go on with their lives after the demise of the unfortunate Gregor.
Still other stories pay even less heed to the somewhat schoolmarmish admonition that they color neatly within the lines of a single perspective. Alice Munro’s “Friend of My Youth” begins with a dream that the first-person narrator has about her mother, and then tells the rest of the story from the point of view of “my mother,” with occasional swings back to that initial “I.” Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” moves seamlessly from one family member to another, exposing the innermost thoughts of an extended family: a mother and father, their children, and the mother’s unmarried sister. Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Heavenly Flame” behaves as if it has never heard of point of view, skipping around from character to character and alighting from time to time on a sort of group perspective, a “we” representing the mini-society vacationing at a country house near a convalescent home.
But even if the short story refuses to fall in line with any of our notions about the number and range of its characters, and the importance of a single perspective, shouldn’t it observe the most (one would think) easy to follow of the Aristotelian conventions: the prescriptions concerning the length of time that the action may comfortably span? It’s true that “Hills Like White Elephants” restricts itself to a single conversation, and that Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” takes place entirely during a session at the ironing board.
On the other hand, “Sonny’s Blues” moves back and forth through decades of the two main characters’ histories, covering the most significant parts of the lifetimes of two men; at the same time, it fits a huge wedge of social history into the confines of a short story. And Lars Gustafsson’s “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases” takes as its subject the existence—and the inner life—of an unnamed man who grows up in the country and spends his later years in a home for the disabled. In the space breaks, the blank space between sections, months, days, or years elapse—gaps that matter far less than we might have supposed, since our hero has been liberated by consciousness from the narrow strictures of time. As much as we might like the short story to keep its borders modest, crisp, and neat, the form keeps defying our best efforts to wrap it up and present it in a tidy package.
Pick up those helpful, instructional books—“Anyone Can Write a Short Story”—and you’re bound to find one of those diagrams, those EKGs of the “typical plotline,” its slow ascent, its peak and valley (or peaks and valleys) meant to indicate the tensing or slackening of dramatic interest. But any attempt to draw such a chart for a story such as Bruno Schulz’s “Sanitarium under the Sign of the Hourglass”—with its labyrinthine plot turns and disorienting switchbacks—will look less like that chart than like one of the webs spun by those poor spiders whom scientists used to torment with doses of mind-altering drugs. How does one chart “The Things They Carried,” which is structured like an obsessive, repetitive list of stuff—the objects and equipment that a group of soldiers are humping through a jungle in Vietnam—and contains, hidden inside, a story of life and death.
Some stories have huge amounts of plot—it has been said that Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O. was used, unedited, as a shooting script for Eric Rohmer’s full-length film of the same name. And some stories—“A & P,” “Cathedral”—have almost no plot at all.
The understandable longing to keep things tidy and nice and neat also leads many critics and teachers to put the “epiphany”—the burst of understanding, self-knowledge, or knowledge about the world that may occur to a character at some crucial point in the story—at the highest peak of that EKG graph. Some even insist that this sort of mini-enlightenment is necessary for the short story—is, in fact, a hallmark and sine qua non of the form.
It’s my understanding that the word epiphany first came into common currency—in the literary rather than the religious sense—in connection with the fiction of James Joyce, many of whose characters do seem to “get something” by the end of his brilliant stories. And sometimes, characters in stories do learn something. By the end of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator has had a vision of what music means to his brother, and of what sort of musician his brother is. The recognition that her precious new hat is the very same one worn by the black woman on the bus has overwhelming—and tragic—consequences for the mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
But one could spend pages listing fictions in which characters come out the other end of the story every bit as benighted as they were in the first sentence. By the end of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Julian could hardly not know that something has happened to change his life. But the story concludes before he—or the reader—has had a chance to intuit what that change is, or what it will mean. It’s hard to say what the unnamed narrator learns in Samuel Beckett’s thrilling and upsetting story “First Love.” To insist that every short story should include a moment of epiphany is like insisting that every talented, marvelous dog jump through the same narrow hoop.
A story creates its own world, often—though not always—with clear or mysterious correspondences to our own. While reading the story, we enter that world. We feel that everything in it belongs there, and has not been forced on it by its creator. In fact, we tend to forget the creator, who has wound the watch of the story and vanished from creation.
Unlike most novels, great short stories make us marvel at their integrity, their economy. If we went at them with our blue pencils, we might find we had nothing to do. We would discover that there was nothing the story could afford to lose without the whole delicate structure collapsing like a soufflé. And yet we are left with a feeling of completeness, a conviction that we know exactly as much as we need to know, that all of our questions have been answered—even if we are unable to formulate what exactly those questions and answers are.
This sense of the artistic whole, this assurance that nothing has been left out and that nothing extraneous has been included, is part of what distinguishes the short story from other pieces of writing with which it shares certain outward characteristics—what separates it, for example, from the newspaper account, which, like the short story, most often features characters and at least some vestige of a plot. But the newspaper version of “The Lady with the Dog”—man’s affair turns serious—manages to leave out every single thing that makes the story so beautiful, significant, and moving.
To communicate the entirety of what a short story has given us, of what it has done for us, of what it has helped us understand or see in a new way, would involve repeating the whole story. It would mean quoting every one of our favorite stories, sentence by sentence, line by line, word by word—and thus providing the only useful answer to the question What makes a short story?