Reality in the modern short story
Style, Fall, 1993 by Charles E. May
In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because,--because--I don't know why.
(Anton Chekhov)
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and
the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though
the writer had stated them. (Ernest Hemingway)
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using
commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,
a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power. (Raymond Carver)
In the history of the development of short fiction, three major stylistic shifts have had far-reaching generic
effects: the humanizing of the allegorical romance in the Renaissance, the high point of which are the
novellas of Boccaccio; the psychologizing of the supernatural legend by the romantics in the early
nineteenth century, best represented by the tales of Poe; and the lyricizing of the slice-of-life story by the
realists in the early twentieth century, most clearly exemplified in the stories of Chekhov. I want to
explore some generic innovations of the twentieth-century short story instituted by Chekhov, particularly
what is meant by "realism" in that form.
I focus on Chekhov, Hemingway, and Raymond Carver not only because they provide a convenient
continuum from early to mid to late twentieth century, but also because, as the epigraphs above suggest,
they are such self-conscious practitioners of the characteristics I wish to consider here: a literary
technique that insists on compression, a rhetorical method that reveals meaning by leaving things out, and
a language style that creates metaphor by means of metonymy. Moreover, all three authors attempt to
express inner reality by describing outer reality and frequently thematize the human dilemma of trying to
say the unsayable.
Although I cannot in this space provide a complete historical context for my remarks, a few
generalizations about previous generic shifts in the short story are necessary. Short fiction originated with
the human need to narratize the perception of spiritual eruptions in the midst of the profane everyday
world--those objectifications of fear or desire that Mircea Eliade has called the "sacred" or "true reality"
for primitive man and woman (10) and that Ernst Cassirer has called moments of "mythic perception"
(33). Although such experiences were initially recounted as revelations, the human need to create
explanatory models for these experiences forced a shift away from a narrative description of the
experience that gave rise to the revelation toward a unified framework of religious conceptual
abstractions.
By the Middle Ages, the revelatory experience had been so conceptualized that true reality was no longer
seen to exist in isolated sacred moments of hierophanic encounter, but rather in a fully organized
theological framework that it became the task of art to describe allegorically. This abstract distancing
from actual human experience inevitably created a generic counterreaction for a return to "the real," the
most famous manifestation of which was the basic shift from the "divine" comedy of Dante to the "human
comedy" of Boccaccio. In the Renaissance novella, the breakup of everyday reality was not the result of a
perception of a sacred or mythic experience, but rather a concatenation of cosmic accident and human
foible. Although this displacement toward everyday life as the subject of narrative fiction was relatively
constant up through the development of the eighteenth-century novel, short fiction retained its primary
purpose as the allegorical expression of the concept of spiritual reality. The clearest example of this
combination of the sacred and the profane is Daniel Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One
Mrs Veal," in which the spiritual, which was previously taken on faith, is replaced by spiritualism, which
has to be made plausible by techniques of verisimilitude.
In the nineteenth century, the German, English, and American romantics initiated a shift toward the
rediscovery of the sacred by a return to the revelatory encounter. However, in order to preserve the old
religious values without their mythological trappings, the romantics secularized the religious encounter by
perceiving it as a basic psychic process. The positioning of a real speaker in a concrete situation
encountering a particular phenomenon that his or her own subjectivity transformed from the profane to
the sacred is the basic characteristic of English Romantic poetry. Prose narrative manifested a similar
configuration of the spiritual and the everyday. For example, the gothic romance form was combined with
the new realism to give rise to the novelle of "poetic realism" in Germany, and Flaubert and Maupassant
provided a naturalistic base for folk legends and tales of the supernatural in France. In America,
Washington Irving grounded mythic European legends in native social life; Hawthorne transformed the
stuff of spiritual allegory into symbolic moral dramas; and Poe concretized the German gothic romance
by basing its projective desires on psychological obsessions.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially in America, this romantic impulse in short fiction
became highly imitated and frequently trivialized: Irving's neoclassical sketches became local-color tales;
Hawthorne's morality plays became sentimental melodramas; and Poe's unified metaphysical tales
became the ironically patterned stories of Ambrose Bierce and O. Henry. With few exceptions--primarily
the impressionistic stories of James, Crane, and Conrad--the short story was seen at this time as an
insignificant form, not worthy of serious critical attention. When Chekhov's stories began to appear in
English at the turn of the century, he was accepted primarily as a realist or naturalist who provided a
welcome relief from the artificial O. Henry type story.
In 1899, American novelist Abraham Cahan said that one of the most striking features of Chekhov's
stories was their "naturalness," that his genius was best seen in stories that are so "absolutely storyless
that there is not enough even to fill a nutshell" (qtd. in Emeljanow 134). In 1915, literary historian H. S.
Canby argued that whereas American stories, a la O. Henry, were based on literary convention,
Chekhov's stories were based on life (qtd. in Emeljanow 134). Joining the chorus of writers and critics
who welcomed Chekhov's realism because it rescued the short story from the artificial ironic pattern that
typified the form at the time, Leonard Woolf suggested that Chekhov had the ability to show "exactly
what a little piece of life is like," and E. M. Forster noted that Chekhov's highest gift was negative in that
he did not write stories with the conventional snap (qtd. in Emeljanow 162, 138).
However, these very characterizations of Chekhov's short fictions as storyless, artless, and lifelike posed
an obvious problem. The critics of the time were not sure how to apprehend an artistic pattern in stories
that seemed patternless or to describe the causal in stories that seemed so casual. Gradually, some critics
began to suspect that more art was involved in Chekhov's stories than appeared on their deceptively
casual surface. In addition to calling him a realist, for example, E. M. Forster suggested that Chekhov was
primarily a poet (qtd. in Emeljanow 138). John Middleton Murry argued that Chekhov's stories were
more "nakedly aesthetic" than those of any writer before him (qtd. in Emeljanow 205), while Conrad
Aiken claimed that Chekhov's genius was primarily lyrical in that he manipulated feeling or mood rather
than plot or thought (qtd. in Emeljanow 205). These opposing opinions--that Chekhov's stories were
"realistic," "natural," and "storyless" and at the same time "poetic," "lyrical," and "aesthetic"--still left
many critics frankly puzzled about how to understand them (Aiken 151).
This Chekhovian uniting of the lyrical and the realistic has since been called a basic characteristic of the
modern short story by a number of short-fiction writers and critics. Eudora Welty once noted that all
stories by a writer come from some source within: "All of one writer's stories must take on their quality,
carry their signature, because of one characteristic lyrical impulse of his mind--the impulse to praise,
love, to call up, to prophesy" (311). Sean O'Faolain has called the form an "emphatically personal
exposition" (53), while William Carlos Williams said that he thinks it a good medium for "nailing down a
single conviction. Emotionally" (5). V. S. Pritchett once suggested that the good short-story writer knows
he is putting on a personal individual act; he catches "a piece of life as it flies" and makes "his personal
performance out of it" (31). And Elizabeth Bowen has said that the first necessity for the short story is
"necessariness" (156). She further suggested that the short story must spring from an impression or
perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should have the "valid central emotion and
inner spontaneity of the lyric" (Bowen 157).
However, the problem is that although many agree that the short story springs from a subjective, lyrical
impulse, Chekhov insisted, and many other writers have agreed, that the writer maintain a distanced
objectivity from the story. Chekhov once warned a colleague, "Subjectivity is a terrible thing. It is bad in
this alone, that it reveals the author's hands and feet" (69). At another time he urged, "You may weep and
moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that
the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect" (98). However,
determining how the stories of Chekhov are both subjective and objective at once still remains a critical
problem.
Virginia Llewellyn Smith's observations about one of Chekhov's best-known stories, "The Lady with the
Dog," is typical. She notes that the plot of the story is obvious, even banal, and that its merit as a work of
art lies in the artistry with which Chekhov has preserved in the story a balance between the "poetic and
the prosaic" (216). Indeed, the tension between the poetic and the prosaic constitutes the basic structure
and theme of the story. The structural core of "The Lady with the Dog" centers on Dimitri Gurov's
discovery that he has two lives: one open and seen like everyone else's and another, "which flowed in
secret" (Chekhov, Select Tales 16). He feels that everything at the center of his life is hidden from others,
while all that was false was open. Thus, he realizes that every individual life rests on secrecy, and he
anguishes over how to get rid of its necessity. The secrecy of Dimitri's idealized desire constitutes true
reality for him just as the sacred constituted true reality for primitive man and woman. Indeed, in the
modern short story, idealized human desire--unsayable, unrealizable, always hovering, like religious
experience in the realm of the "not yet"--replaces the sacred revelation embodied in primal short-fiction
forms.
A helpful suggestion about the modern short story's characteristic balancing of the lyricism of the private
life with the realism of public life has been made by Georg Lukacs in his pre-Marxist Theory of the
Novel. Perceiving the short story as a fictional form that deals with a "fragment of life" lifted out of life's
totality, Lukacs says the implication of this delimitation is that the form is stamped with its origin in the
author's "will and knowledge." The form is inevitably lyrical because of the author's "form-giving,
structuring, delimiting act." Its lyricism lies in "pure selection." Yet, for all this lyricism, the short story
must deal with event, says Lukacs; the lyricism is concealed behind the "hard outlines of the event." And
it is the concrete event that communicates the poetic intensity of the modern short story (51-52). Flannery
O'Connor has claimed, "The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he
describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. . . . His problem is really how to make
the concrete work double time for him" (98). The result, as Raymond Carver says, is to endow
commonplace things with immense power (Fires 15).
In the romantic story, a la Poe, reality is radically subjective, for the typical Poe teller is caught in a
psychologically obsessive reality that swallows it up. However, reality in the modern short story seems to
be a purely objective event, even as at the same time the intense selectivity practiced by Chekhov,
Hemingway, and Carver results in an intensification of reality that no longer seems objective and real, but
what recent critics have called "hyperrealism" in Carver's stories. In Hemingway's and Carver's stories,
reality is so attenuated and restricted (rather than developed and expanded as in the realistic novel) that it
takes on an hallucinatory, dreamlike effect even when the events occur in the wide-awake daylight of the
everyday world. The result in Hemingway's stories, notes Carlos Baker, is a sense of "noonday
nightmares" (188). The reason for this effect, Baker suggests, is that although Hemingway's stories are
naturalistic in that they present visible reality as hard facts, at the same time they have a postsymbolist
structure.
When a story presents "hard facts" within a symbolic structure, objects and events are transformed from
mere matter into meaningful metaphors by the motivating force of the story's own thematic and structural
demands. For example, in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," the spatial symbolism of the story,
in which the characters are positioned between two railroad tracks--each for trains going in opposite
directions from the other--and between two kinds of landscape--one alive and green and one brown and
dead--is motivated by the basic inescapable nature of the conflict between the characters, not by the
realistic necessity of verisimilitude.
The temporal symbolism of the story also derives from and reflects the story's thematic and aesthetic
demands rather than the need for verisimilar sequence. The discrepancy between the dramatic time of
thirty-five minutes between trains during which the dialogue-based story takes place and the ten to fifteen
minutes of real time required to deliver realistically that dialogue suggests that this story contains more
silence than speech. And indeed, like Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog," "Hills Like White Elephants"
is a story about a human dilemma that no amount of talking can resolve.
In the old allegorical tale or romance form, the received traditional conventions of the story or its
underlying conceptual framework justified the structure of its events. In the romantic Poe tale, the
obsessed mind of the teller or central character created the hallucinatory world of the story. In the O.
Henry type of story the "reality" of the fiction derived from the preconceived ironic pattern that governed
or motivated its events and objects. In the modern short story, no received tradition, obsessed narrator, or
calculated pattern exists to justify or motivate its tightly unified structure. However, in spite of what
seems to be a realistic style in which events are motivated primarily by metonymic sequence and
verisimilitude, modern realistic stories are still able to create a metaphoric sense of reality.
Roman Jakobson's famous distinction between the metaphoric and the metonymic poles of discourse may
provide some help in understanding this problem. Jakobson chides literary critics for paying so much
attention to the principle of metaphor in poetry while ignoring the principle of metonymy in prose, noting
that prose is often neglected because its verbal devices are unostentatious and seem transparent, and the
parallelisms are less obvious (124). The metonymic style of realism in the modern short story compels the
reader to transform sequence into equivalence and to spatialize the temporal in order to make
metaphorically meaningful that which at first seems merely contiguous (124). Realism in the short story,
in other words, is not the same as realism in the novel. Realistic long fiction, which develops on the
principle of combination, primarily leads away from parallelism, moving further away from a core
subject, elaborating by dealing with all those elements contiguous with it. However, as Lukacs has
pointed out, the short story's method is lyrical and concentrative rather than realistic and expansive (5155).
The novel form usually gains the reader's assent to its reality by the creation of enough metonymic details
to make readers feel they know the experience in the same way they know external reality. However, in
the realistic short story, metonymic details are transformed into metaphoric meaning by the thematic
demands of the story that organize them by repetition and parallelism into meaningful patterns. For
example, the hard details of the external world in Robinson Crusoe exist as an external resistance to be
overcome. However, in Hemingway's "Big, Two-Hearted River," the extensive metonymic details exist
primarily to provide an objectification of Nick's psychic distress. As opposed to Crusoe, Nick is not
concerned with surviving an external conflict but rather an internal one. In "Big, Two-Hearted River," the
story's obsessive focusing on the external world does not derive from the metonymic compulsion to
combine details, but the metaphoric need to select, repeat, and thus understand the essence of the
experience the details create. The result is a sense of a ritual activity, which Baker says is largely
responsible for the "noonday nightmares" effect of Hemingway's stories. The hard material outlines of the
external world disappear as metonymic material metaphorically objectifies that which can neither be seen
nor said. Thus, at the end of Hemingway's story, Nick's refusal to go into the swamp is a purely
metaphoric refusal, having nothing to do with the real qualities of the swamp, only its aesthetic qualities.
The effect created in the realistic novel is that the story could go on and on, including digressions,
extended descriptions, more developed dialogue, more development in time; things move outward in a
continually enlarging circle, metonymically encompassing more and more, conceivably all of human
experience. In the modern short story, there is an opposite effect of compression that derives from the
form's development of what John Dewey calls "an experience." As Dewey says, "an experience," as
opposed to continuous experience, is marked off from the flow of life by the unity of that experience.
"The existence of the unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of
the variation of its constituent parts." Emotion, says Dewey, is the motivating force. "It selects what is
congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally
disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an experience" (42).
This focus on "an experience" explains why tone rather than narrative event holds the modern short story
together. Just after the turn of the century, Canby called attention to the fact that the art of modern short
fiction was as much that of tone as incident. The work of the author in the story is "harmonized into one
tone, as if narrative were a painting" (303). Many years later, Irving Howe argued that:
if the short-story writer is to create the illusion of reality, he must sing mostly aria and very little
recitative. As a result, he uses a series of technical devices, often quite simple inflections of
style, the end effect of which we call the story tone. A novel written in one dominant tone
becomes intolerable; a story too often deviating from it risks chaos. (142)
The unified tone of the modern short story suggests that by breaking into the temporal flow of life and
infusing it with the perspective of the teller, the realistic short story creates not a "slice of life" (which
suggests an arbitrary delimitation), but rather a subjectively charged experience motivated by the teller's
need to discover and reveal meaning. The problem for the writer then becomes how to transform a series
of real events into something more than mere events, something that has meaning. Although generally the
realists rejected the Emersonian belief that "every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact," shortstory realists still insisted that natural facts arranged within an aesthetic pattern can resonate with
meaning. Thus, in the modern short story, the only order possible is aesthetic order, and the only
resolution possible is aesthetic resolution. It is as if short-story writers, while dismissing the supernatural
as unknowable, focus on another kind of unknowable: the unsolvable and unsayable elements of idealized
human desire.
Erich Heller has said that what was new about nineteenth-century realism was "the passion for
understanding, the desire for rational appropriation, the driving force toward the expropriation of the
mystery" (596). However, because the short story always deals with something that breaks up the
everyday, if this breakup cannot be integrated, explained, incorporated, or articulated, then the story is not
realistic. The transition from the romance form to the short-story form in the nineteenth century is marked
by a combination of real and unreal characters in the same story. For example, the "real" narrator is
unable to account for the unreal Bartleby in Melville's famous story, and the "real" narrator in Poe's bestknown story cannot integrate the idealized unreality of Roderick Usher.
However, when all the characters in the story are "real," as they are in the modern realistic story, it is the
structure of the event itself that seems unreal and that retains something of the old mystery of the
romance. Such disruptions as an unexpected death in Chekhov's story "Misery," the breakup of a
relationship in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?" and the
psychic effects of war in "Big, Two-Hearted River" throw characters out of their ordinary world in much
the same way that supernatural encounters did in the old romance tale. Fully mimetic characters in a story
do not make the story realistic if the situation they confront eludes their power to incorporate it within a
framework of the familiar, natural world. The realistic impulse creates a realistic story only when it
succeeds in convincing the involved character or the reader that the mystery confronted has been, or can
be, integrated.
When a character moves from ignorance to knowledge--a common structural device in the realistic novel-this indeed means he or she has been able to bring the confronted experience or phenomenon within the
realm of the naturalistic, cause-effect world. If, however, the knowledge arrived at is metaphysical and
inchoate--that is, not satisfactorily the knowledge of social, natural, psychological frameworks--then it
remains revelatory, intuitive, unsayable. Revelation does not necessitate change if what is revealed is
some aspect of human behavior that cannot be accounted for socially, naturalistically, psychologically, or
is so morally intolerable or impossible that no change in the perceiver can effect any change in the basic
situation: in short, when nothing can be done about it and when language seems inadequate to express it.
The problem Chekhov faced, dramatized, and thematized so clearly in one of his best-known stories,
"Misery," is how to communicate an inner reality that a character cannot express by describing an action
in such a way that, if "expressed properly," it will embody the complexity of that inner state. The fact that
the old cab-driver's son's death is a "strange thing" or a "queer business" is communicated by the
combination of his inexpressible grief and the need of his two fares to get somewhere. While they want
things to go on, Iona wants everything to stop. Moreover, this inexpressibility is manifested by the
juxtaposition of Iona's loneliness and pathos against the absurdity of the stick-like gingerbread horse who
seems in deep thought.
Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance" is a particularly pure example of the Chekhovian story's
convention of trying to express inner reality by focusing on outer reality. The unnamed man in the story
has arranged all his furniture out on his lawn just as it was inside as an external manifestation of his inner
life. Although Carver does not tell us that the problem here is that the man's marriage has broken up, the
single reference to a nightstand and lamp for "his" side of the bed and "her" side of the bed is sufficient to
signal the meaningful absence of his wife.
The young couple who come by and make offers for the man's furniture lie on the bed, turn on the
television, and in short act out their own daily activities on the remnants of the man's lost relationship.
They sense something strangely meaningful about the situation but can only express it elliptically. The
girl only says, "Wouldn't it be funny if," but does not complete the sentence. There is something of the
Ancient Mariner in the protagonist in "Why Don't You Dance?" However, what holds us is not his voice,
but rather Carver's objectification of his intolerable and inescapable situation. There is also something of
the Mariner in the girl, who keeps telling the story over and over because she feels that "there is more to
it, and she was trying to get it talked out" (What We Talk About 10). However, denied the symbolic
language of the Ancient Mariner, modern short-story characters are less driven by the compulsion to
repeat their stories than they are to reenact them.
Chekhov once advised another writer that his works lacked the "compactness that makes short things
alive" (Letters on the Short Story 82). However, what makes a short story "alive" is not that it be teeming
with the metonymic details of everyday reality, but rather that it be a unified artistic entity. Pattern has
always dominated over plausibility in the short story. Many writers have noted this basic characteristic of
the form. Pritchett says that the short story "answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and
beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience" (113). British
writer Elizabeth Taylor has suggested that by its sustaining of one mood the short story can give the
feeling of "being lifted into another world, instead of rather sinking into it, as one does with longer
fiction" (471). New Zealand writer Maurice Shadbolt says that the challenge of the form is to pull as
much of life as the story can bear into the fewest pages and therefore produce "if possible, that
hallucinatory point in which time past and time future seem to co-exist with time present" (68).
Realism in the modern short story from Chekhov to Carver creates metaphorically meaningful reality by
focusing on metonymic detail in a highly compressed, highly patterned form. In "Errand," one of the last
stories published before his untimely death from cancer, Raymond Carver epitomizes this central shortstory characteristic while at the same time paying tribute to his master Chekhov. Like a Chekhov story,
"Errand" seems, for the most part, less a unified narrative than a straightforward report of Chekhov's
death in a hotel in the resort city of Badenweiler, Switzerland. The story recounts without comment
Chekhov's last hours as a doctor visits him in his room and as his wife Olga Knipper stands by helplessly.
Knowing that it is hopeless and that it is only a matter of minutes before Chekhov's death, the doctor
orders champagne and three glasses from the kitchen. A few minutes after taking a drink Chekhov dies.
Carver has said that he was prompted to write the story while reading Henri Troyat's biography of
Chekhov. He was particularly struck by the doctor in attendance ordering the bottle of champagne, and he
began by considering such ordinary metonymic details as how the doctor went about ordering it, how it
was delivered, and what the protocol was when it arrived. Carver said he was seriously interested in what
he was doing, but he was not sure what he was doing; it was just "an opportunity to pay homage--if I
could bring it off, do it rightly and honorably--to Chekhov, the writer who has meant so much to me for
such a long time" ("On 'Errand'" 124).
What makes "Errand" a story rather than a historical account is the return of the young waiter who brings
the champagne. When the young man comes to the room the next morning to bring a vase of roses and to
pick up the champagne bottle and glasses, Olga, who has spent the remainder of the night sitting alone
with Chekhov's body, urges him to go into the town and find a mortician, someone who takes great pains
in his work and whose manner is appropriately reserved. The young man listens as Olga tells him in great
detail what to do. Meanwhile, the boy is thinking of something else; on the previous night, just after
Chekhov died, the cork which the doctor had pushed back into the champagne bottle popped out again
and now lies just at the toe of the boy's shoe. He wants to bend over and pick it up but does not want to
intrude by calling attention to himself. When Olga finishes the story-like description of the errand she
wishes the boy to perform, he leans over, still holding the vase of roses, and without looking reaches
down and closes the cork into his hand.
It is this single, simple detail that makes "Errand" a fitting tribute to the short-story writing art of both
Chekhov and Carver. The cork is a concrete object in the world that the reader can almost tangibly feel as
the boy closes his hand around it. However, it is the concrete act of picking up the cork that humanizes an
otherwise abstract report of Chekhov's death and ironically makes it alive. It is a purely objective
description that resonates with powerful subjective feelings. It means nothing, but it means a great deal. It
means that in the presence of death, living acts continue. It means that with the end, nothing must be left
lying around. It means that although Chekhov is dead, the essence of his art remains. It embodies the most
important lesson that Carver learned from Chekhov: that the smallest human act has dignity and that
complex human meaning can be communicated by the simplest of gestures and the most trivial of objects.
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