CNQ 79
This issue of CNQ honours the short story and appears concurrently with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, meeting June 16-19 in Toronto. Special attention will be paid to the Canadian achievement in the genre. You are now holding a leading document.
A few years ago, I suggested that the short story (despite its brevity) is an expansive literary form, and the novel (except for its page-length) is miniaturist. A story includes all that can be said about a confined number of moments, incidents or anecdotes. The novel shortcuts through thousands more. The conventional description of short fiction implies that stories (because of their brevity) must shrink the stage, reduce complexity, and direct their energy to a single, blinding revelation. If that were true, Alice Munro among many others, would be considered a muddled and ineffectual storywriter.
Novels, it’s said, deserve higher status because they exhaust the limits of narrative ingenuity: a marathon not a sprint; an epic, not a lyric; giga and mega, not nano and micro. As a culture, we’re easily intimidated by size and scale. Less might be more, but more is always best. My friend Lee K. Abbott, master storyist but novel-free, once observed, “I never had an idea I couldn’t treat in under twenty pages.”
I realize these are familiar claims and grumbles coming from a dedicated storyist. We don’t get respect. Even when we do well, it looks so breezy and natural it must be luck, not strategy. Most “novels” these days are really inflated, or linked, stories. And that’s been true for a very long time: The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are novellas. I leave it to greater minds to define the genre of Moby-Dick. The lasting achievements in American writing – Cheever, Carver, Hemingway, O’Connor, Malamud, for starters – and Canadian writing, are in shorter forms.
These observations get us absolutely nowhere. I’ll try a different approach.
Let’s stipulate that a good or great story is the equivalent of a good or great novel in its construction, implication and evocation. The only problem is how to corral it, critically. We don’t know how to talk about stories. It doesn’t seem worth the effort. Story collections and anthologies must be reviewed, but the normal baker’s dozen of stories practically guarantees that the singular qualities of each story will be shortchanged. Justice dictates that a single story collection could well demand the same commentary-space as at least a half-dozen novels, and that’s not going to happen.
That challenge has been addressed in this issue. I hope that future issues of CNQ will contain dedicated essays on single stories, in the manner of Doug Glover on Alice Munro’s “Menensteung,” Michael Darling on Audrey Thomas’ “Local Customs” and Jeet Heer on the “pastiche” of Leon Rooke’s “The Last Shot.” Collectively and individually, these are brilliant and utterly accessible feats of literary criticism. Grandiloquence has not infected the short story discourse. (I’m not discounting other noteworthy reviews in this issue; it’s merely to point out what can be done with a single story).
Let’s further stipulate that a great storywriter’s life’s work – say, Alice Munro’s or Mavis Gallant’s, or certainly Cheever’s or Updike’s or Rooke’s or Barry Hannah’s, or Joyce Carol Oates’ – looked back upon from a distance, forms an intact, coherent, autobiographical entity on the order of Proust’s Remembrance. You can find in the collective density of their life’s achievement a cast of characters to rival any novelist’s, acuity to match any historian’s, moments of passion, rage, reflection and humour that can only be called cinemagraphic, a catalogue of national traits that would please an ethnologist, but weaving through them all is a line, a single character with many disguises, a single voice with many registers. It is that human dimension of the story that defines its uniqueness.
A few months ago, the New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter, reviewed the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of ink drawings by Agnolo de Cosimo di Mariano Tori, otherwise known as “Bronzino” (1503-1572). A few striking reproductions accompanied the article, in particular, “Head of a Young Man,” whom Cotter describes as “someone the artist might have met on a beach, a surfer at Santa Monica.” Whimsy aside, I too took note of the face, neck and shoulders, particularly when that remarkable face was detected in its later, near-anonymity in a large, densely populated painting.
I’m going to quote liberally from Cotter, because his discussion of Bronzino’s drawing (as opposed to the larger painting) is a parallel discussion to the ongoing distinctions between short fiction and the novel. If it’s not too obvious, here’s the finale to the essay:
Then look at a reproduction of the painting . . . for which the drawing is a study. There we see the sitter at half length, his neck encircled by a lace collar; his shoulders encased in a rich black coat, his hair covered by a plumed cap. His face is more perfectly composed but looks tranquilized, inelastic, masklike; his glance is off to the side, away from us, fixed on nothing in particular. The picture is fascinating: a seductive, princely invention. But it’s more about haberdashery and attitude than about character. The face in the drawing is the one I remember, the face of someone real, someone I might actually know.
Drawing versus painting. (Even the title of Cotter’s review, “A Line Both Spirited and Firm” suggests the interchangeability of art and literary criticism). “Line” (drawing) versus filled-in blocks of colour (painting). When I read a good story, I feel I’m getting “the whole picture.” But too many novels I read come across, in Cotter’s words, as “tranquilized, inelastic and masklike” with a focus “off to one side,” all haberdashery and attitude. Or, quoting Cotter again, “Painting was all about finish, the smoothing over of discrepant textures, the hiding of the seams. Drawing occupied a far looser and more relaxed aesthetic category.”
Patrons demanded paintings. Artists preferred drawings. Drawings (stories) are looser, their seams show, their textures are discrepant.
Then Cotter goes on to the heart of the matter:
The drawn line, disegno, was the root element of the Renaissance tradition from which he came. Its character varies from artist to artist among his Mannerist contemporaries. Parmigianino gave his line a swoony, ribbony lift; Jacopo Pontormo infused it with the encephalographic jitters.
Bronzino does something in between, less extreme. His line, or sense of movement, is vivacious but purposeful, hot but not wild. It was the energy source for his art.
Or think of the cartoons in any issue of The New Yorker, and their lines – the sketchy, the jittery, the staid, the martial precision of some, the corporately slick, the faux-naif – matched to, or playing against, the perfect caption. Think of the lines that thread their way through a favourite story (certainly that is the point of Glover’s essay on Munro). Check it out in Rebecca Rosenblum’s “Sweet” in this issue, or a lovely story by Montreal’s Michael Libling, “Why that Crazy Old Lady Goes up the Mountain” in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction (metaphysical and utterly realistic at the same time) or the typical lines that define the Irish, the American, and of course the Russian story.
This is what we know. Stories are the equivalents of novels. Great storyists are the equivalents of epic novelists. The analysis of a story is as demanding (or more) than the analysis of a novel. Stories expand, novels contract. It’s not a matter of scale; it’s more a question of key. Ballads, jazz, opera; we get wedded to a form, a voice, and then we build, room by room, and someone might say, when it’s all over, “what a mansion you’ve built!” Others would go inside and admire the many rooms, all of them decorated, all of them of use to the living or dead.
Some cultures – Canada, the US, Ireland, New Zealand – excel at the story. Others – UK, South Africa, Australia – are novelists. In the end, it’s all the same. Gershwin and Verdi, Coltrane and Sondheim. Sit back and enjoy.