Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - The Health of the Short Story: Part 2, Oct 2022

Lucy Dawes Durneen introduces the second of two Special Issues of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice dedicated to the theme of ‘the health of the short story’. She reflects on the process of editing and arranging articles that speak to and across the individual issues, and the way in which this itself mirrors the short story’s trifold ability to diagnose, observe and potentially suture together resolutions for the challenges of the human condition, both within the boundaries of the text, and as a discrete tool for personal recovery.

This article focuses on literature’s potential for healing – both medical and sociopolitical – in times of severe crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect is an important literary tool to make people aware of social inequalities, in particular reading or writing short stories with the experience of a simultaneous real-life pandemic. Reading is an embodied act through which the reader enters into a dialogue with both the author and the text. Emotions emerge that are often more deeply stored in memory than the words as such, and that changes our perception of the world. This effect is also encapsulated in Siri Hustvedt’s analysis of reading practices, Sara Ahmed’s affect theory and Rita Felski’s four ways of engaging with texts. I analyse John O’Hara’s short story ‘The Doctor’s Son’ (1935), situated in rural Pennsylvania at the time of the 1918 Influenza, and Victor LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ (2020), resonating with the COVID-19 pandemic in an isolated apartment building in New York City. Both stories question the concept of pandemics as the great levellers by pointing out social injustice due to class and ethnic hierarchies. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and Poe’s emphasis on the preconceived and single effect of fear and subsequent horror caused by the ‘Red/Black Death’, as a starting point, the article presents O’Hara’s story as a manifestation of the medical, social and ethnic phenomena at work in 1918: social distancing, facial masks, closed public institutions, people’s resistance to these measures and medical treatment along ethnic and class lines. LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ allows readers a glimpse into the relationship between an unnamed African American woman, who is also the narrator, and Pilar, a Colombian American woman, who dies of the virus. As part of a contemporary Decameron project, ‘Recognition’ stresses the human need for community, communication and, thus mutual human recognition, giving the dead – whether rich or poor – a name and demanding to undo systemic social inequalities. In that sense, literature can heal the nation.

Short story collections, fragmentary assemblages, negotiate a particular kind of relationship to the corpus or ‘body of work’. They communicate an ambivalence about a process of embodiment and of growth. In their relationship to each other, as collected but non-continuous, they grow by means of a pulling apart, where each new piece ruptures, destroys, returns back to the beginning, that which has come before. This personal essay considers the writer’s own process of growing such a written body of work whilst in recovery from an eating disorder: whereby her own body’s reluctance to put on weight beyond the limits of the page is also played out in a struggle on the page. How to reconcile desire with its inevitable end, a body (of work)? The essay considers how, in its distaste the prospect of fullness and completion, the fragment may articulate a disordered relationship with nourishment but, when collected together, may offer a way to think about writing alternative bodies, non-conforming bodies, bodies which are always something less than whole. As such, writing becomes a tool in a recovery of a body of sorts. What is achieved in such fragmentary process may not be a healthy body, a reassuring body, but it is better than nothing and may better express the ambivalence and disturbance of body as process. Drawing small nourishment from Hélène Cixous, from Maurice Blanchot, the essay theorizes a kind of writing which has learnt to survive and, as a collection of fragments, does so as evidence or proof – of a ‘good enough’ body which, is of course, defined as much by the ways in which it falls short.

Creative non-fiction about a personal experience of early miscarriage, which is a largely hidden loss. Reflecting on experiences in the early 1990s, a background of Northern Irish Catholicism, where women’s fertility is rigorously controlled, both informs attitudes and gives way to an earlier memory in the late seventies, where I felt I was in control of my fertility. However, the present reflection now considers reproductive control as something further than contraception; including those difficult times, when a body edges beyond our wills. Despite all our gains for autonomy and reproductive rights, involuntary miscarriage is a devastating loss, which we do not control.

Review of: The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950, Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant (eds) (2021)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 336 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47446-108-5, h/bk,

ISBN 978-1-47446-110-8, e-book, £90 hardback, £90

pre-order in paperback, £24.99

A conversation between acclaimed Chilean short story writer and novelist, Carolina Brown and Lucy Dawes Durneen, including a focused reflection on the writing process for the accompanying short story, ‘House of the Red Deer’. Brown discusses aspects of her creative practice, touching on the relationship of her writing to photography, as well as the contemporary Latin American short story, the portrayal of the body, and the importance of nature and place in her work.