Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2012

Drawing on the comments of over 100 short story writers, this article argues that many authors like short stories largely for the same reasons that many readers do not – primarily because what constitutes the ‘life’ of the short story is not merely reflected by its content, but created by its pattern and form. Most writers agree that the short story’s poem-like emphasis on language and form and its concern with basic human mystery rather than time-bound social issues makes different demands on readers than the novel does.

Even as George Saunders jettisons the usual trappings of literary realism, he does so not in order to debunk authorship and authority (cf. Barthes) or to reduce a story to the language of its own telling. Rather, he reasserts the writer’s moral role, and thereby defines a space for the figure of the author. With reference to Lionel Trilling’s defence of Nathaniel Hawthorne and ‘shadow realism’ this article situates Saunders in a literary tradition which challenges reductive conceptions of mimesis. It cites examples from Saunders’ short stories and novellas (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996; Pastoralia, 2000; In Persuasion Nation, 2006), and also addresses an author-sponsored website, with attention to how Internet materials are not only a promotion of Saunders’ work, but also an extension of it. Saunders foregrounds the referential workings of language while remaining attached to a sense that language is a tool for moral questions.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s primary concern as an author was to write good stories without trying to impose any specific intention on the reader. He overtly disliked allegory, which he viewed as ‘purposed domination of the author’, preferring instead what he called ‘applicability’, which guaranteed ‘the freedom of the reader’. Although he admitted that an author’s ‘sub-creation’ could not but be affected to some degree by his personal experience, he rejected the many-faceted theories built around his own writings, which were considered as sources of inspiration by critics, viewing them as ‘at best guesses’ from ambiguous and inadequate evidence. If aspects of Tolkien’s unconscious or unavowed intentionality remain either well hidden under the surface or more diluted in the maze of his ‘Legendarium’, we can nevertheless (up to a point) use the author as a guide concerning his minor fiction. This article examines the extent to which the authorial figure can be perceived in his two short stories ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and ‘Smith of Wootton Major’, and how this can fit in with the concept of applicability. Both works are placed in the light of the author’s biographical landmarks and, most importantly, of his theory on fairy stories.

The new prominence of authors teaching Creative Writing in the academy might have seemed unlikely given a critical context that railed against the influence of authors in interpretation. This discussion suggests reasons for an unlikely coalescence between theory and practice, and considers how situating the study of writing within the academy might have affected the short form, giving rise to more mimetic, less diegetic types of story and certain fashions in narrative style, ones often related to drama and film. The discussion considers the workshop vogue for the second person narrative, examining a story by Lorrie Moore; it investigates filmic influences including Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage; and compares two versions of a story by Raymond Carver story.

In a 2006 article in The Independent, Christina Patterson echoes Gore Vidal by stating ‘Death, as any biographer knows, can be an excellent career move’. Commenting on a brief revival of Angela Carter’s work in 2006 concomitant with Emma Rice’s bringing of Nights at the Circus to the stage, and Vintage’s reissuing of six of her works with new introductions, Patterson refers to Carter’s ‘whole new lease on life’ suggesting the metamorphic potential and curious temporality of the authorial figure with regard to reader reception. The Vintage editions suggest, as Stephen Benson observes, the ‘legend’ of the ‘Carter effect’, identified by The British Academy Humanities Research Board, which distributes postgraduate studentships. This ‘Carter’ effect was also fostered by the theatricality of Carter’s authorial performances. Sarah Gamble has observed the ‘screen’ of authorial identity upon which readers are led to project impressions, which functions as a ‘hall of mirrors’ in relation to penetrating to the authentic author. Such attempts at authorial effacement and control are certainly not unusual. However, Carter’s postmodern enactment of the play of surfaces in the realm of authorial identity appears to heighten the consequent shifting of boundaries between fiction and life staged in her fiction. This article will address the interaction between the games with identity inscribed in Carter’s short stories and the complex identity and temporality of the Performative Author.

The position of the author in a literary fairy tale is ambiguous; either they can control the text to suit their purposes and force their style of morality on their readers, or they can enter into friendship with their text and their readers on a joint search for wonder. Developing the educational theories of Parker J. Palmer, this article suggests a concept of the fairy tale as poietic space, textual dialogue arising from a ‘knowledge born of compassion’ rather than violence or control. It uses this theory to discuss Claire Massey’s short story ‘Feather Girls’ (2010), a re-imagining of the swan maiden tale type (AaTh 400). Massey is rapidly emerging as one of the most significant authors of her generation, and her work deserves close critical attention. In particular, this article addresses how Massey uses bird metamorphosis to re-imagine and reconstruct gender dynamics, femininity and motherhood in the fairy tale tradition.

The American writer Reynolds Price’s fiction stems from his own experience: not only does he describe people he knows or used to know (family relatives, friends) but he provides his readers with his first-hand response to specific situations. Through a close analysis of three of his short stories (‘Different’, ‘TheWarrior Princess Ozimba’ and ‘Uncle Grant’), this article shows how Price turns life into fiction. The stories are thus read in relation to the hypotexts that Price’s preliminary notes provide and to his memoirs (Clear Pictures in 1989 and Ardent Spirits in 2009). Through the use of various texts that make up Price’s oeuvre, this article demonstrates that Price’s presence is often palpable even though he manages to distance himself from the events he narrates in the stories. He fully participates in the elaboration of the actual personalities of the people he conjures up in his memoirs and thus blends reality and imagination.

Ali Smith’s 2008 collection The First Person And Other Stories re-examines the implied contract between reader and writer. In particular, the first piece in the collection, ‘True Short Story’, challenges our reading of the text as ‘story’. It is highly metafictive, with little conventional structure, and apparently autobiographical, and the narrator must be the author too – mustn’t she(it)? Smith insists that we read the author into the work, in order to create a new set of questions around the debate of authorial identity. ‘True Short Story’ considers what difference it makes to the reader when the author’s voice is apparently unmediated by any fictional narrator. Does this make the story autobiography rather than fiction? If it is not fiction, does that mean it is not a story either? If it is fiction, why use so many apparently verifiable facts? The article also considers whether Jorge Luis Borges has anything to say about Smith’s disruption of the sujet. The figure of the author in ‘Borges and I’ is compared with that in ‘True Short Story’, together with Paul Auster’s apparent appearance in his City of Glass.(1987)

In Katherine Mansfield’s stories, writers and artists are far from idealized. She portrays fictional authors as obnoxious (Raoul Duquette in ‘Je ne parle pas français’); spongers and would-be artists or writers in ‘Marriage à la mode’ or in ‘Bliss’; voyeurs cannibalizing on others’ lives like the eponymous protagonist in ‘Miss Brill’ (a sort of immobile flâneur; see Walter Benjamin); or repressed authors as the male novel writer and the female playwright in ‘Psychology’. This article analyses these figures of the author not mainly in reference to autobiographical questions, but essentially to elucidate Mansfield’s conception of the author, her satire of the decadents and questions related to Bloomsbury, to modernist ethics and to what her strategies of displacement of authorial issues through distorted figures of authorship reveal of her concerns and anxieties.

This article traces the development of figures of the author in the short fiction of the Irish writer Mary Lavin against the background of her anomalous position as woman, writer and mother in the conservative and patriarchal context of mid-century Ireland. Through a detailed reading of six stories, the article shows how after staging a confident author figure in the early ‘A Story with a Pattern’, Lavin turns to dramatizing the tension between her roles as mother and artist in a series of oppositional characters in stories such as ‘The Becker Wives’, ‘Eterna’ and ‘In a Café’. Her artist figures, modelled after the Romantic conception of the author as exceptionally gifted outsiders, are unable to attain ‘ordinary’ lives as wives or mothers; while Lavin’s ‘alter egos’ in the so-called widow stories are depicted only in a domestic context. Only in two stories written at the end of her career does Lavin again stage an author figure who combines the roles of mother and writer, thus offering an alternative to the Romantic image of the author that has long dominated Irish literary culture.

FOUR SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS FROM COMMA PRESSLEMISTRY: A CELEBRATION OF THE WORK OF STANISLAW LEM, RA PAGE AND MAGDA RACZYN´SKA (EDS) (2011) Manchester: Comma Press, 292 pp., ISBN: 9781905583324, p/bk, £7.99ON FLYING OBJECTS (TRANS. EMIL HAKL), PETR KOPET AND KAREN REPPIN (2011) Manchester: Comma Press, 158 pp., ISBN: 9781905583386, p/bk, £7.99TWICE IN A LIFETIME (TRANS. AGUST BORGPOR SVERISSON), MARIA HELGA GUOMUNDSDOTTIR AND ANNA BENASSI (2011) Manchester: Comma Press, 129 pp., ISBN: 9781905583362, p/bk, £7.99THE WAR TOUR, ZOE LAMBERT (2011) Manchester: Comma Press, 214 pp., ISBN: 9781905583287, p/bk, £7.99LIFE TIMES: STORIES 1952–2007, NADINE GORDIMER (2010) London: Bloomsbury, ISBN: 978 0 7475 9263 1, h/bk (also available in p/bk), 550 pp., £30.00