The Classic Short Story

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THE CLASSIC SHORT STORY
The Classic Short Story,

1870-1925:
Theory of a Genre
Florence Goyet
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2014 Florence Goyet
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Goyet, Florence. The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre.
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039
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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039
Cover portraits (left to right): Henry James, Flickr Commons (http://tiny.
cc/76rg7w), Guy de Maupassant, Wikimedia (http://tiny.cc/2bsg7w),
Giovanni Verga, Wikimedia (http://tiny.cc/eesg7w), Anton Chekhov,
Wikimedia (http://tiny.cc/1fsg7w) and Akutagawa Rynosuke, Wikimedia
(http://tiny.cc/ohsg7w).
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To my parents, Janine and Roger Bressand-Saureil.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: STRUCTURE
1. Paroxystic Characterisation
2. Antithetic Structure
3. Ending with a Twist
4. The Tools of Brevity
5. Conclusion to Part I
PART II: MEDIA
6. Exoticism in the Classic Short Story
7. Short Stories and the Travelogue
PART III: READER, CHARACTER AND AUTHOR
8. A Foreign World
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation
10. The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader
11. Distance and Emotion
12. Conclusion to Part III: Are Dostoevskys Short Stories
Polyphonic?
Epilogue: Beyond the Classic Short Story
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
This book is a fully revised and updated translation, by Yvonne Freccero

and Florence Goyet, of La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: description dun genre son
apoge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), which sold out in
2012.
For their encouragement and advice over the years, I am very grateful
to Pierre Brunel, Lionel Gossman, Vladimir Kataev, Guido Baldi, Michel
Cadot, Peter Por, Batrice Didier, Thierry Mar, Simone Bonnassieux,
Odile Dussud, Kato Masako and Gregory McNamee, as well as the late
Elisabeth Shaw, Jean-Jacques Origas and Kato Shuichi. I am indebted to
the University of Grenoble-Alpes, the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS), and the Fondation Thiers for giving me the research
time to write this book, and to Princeton University and the University of
Wisconsin at Madison for their Visiting Fellowships. I thank my research
team, Rhtorique de lAntiquit la Rvolution (RARE), for the grant they
gave me. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Institut dtudes
slaves and Bibliothque nationale de France (especially M. Jean Watelet)
for their assistance in finding materials. For their help with the translation,
my sincerest thanks go to my translator Yvonne Freccero, my editor Corin
Throsby and Open Book Publishers.
Introduction
This book aims to characterise what I consider to be the classic short story,
which was written throughout the world by both major and minor short
story writers in the period covering roughly 1870-1925. Although the short
story has tended to be characterised as offering psychological complexity
and nuanced characters, the classic short stories operated under extremely
strict conventions. Despite the fact that this form of the short story was
practiced so widely, its importance to the genre has yet to be sufficiently
acknowledged in the extensive literature on the topic.
In the Anglophone world, two major works gave birth and shape
to a revival of short story criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s.1 Mary
Rohrbergers book on Nathaniel Hawthorne defined the short story as an
epiphany, revealing to the reader that there is more to the world than
which can be discovered through the senses.2 Ten years later, Charles
1
On the history of short story criticism, see Susan Lohafer, Introduction to Part I, in
Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 3-12. See also Lohafers (very
brief, but particularly clear) outline in her introduction to The Tales We Tell: Perspectives
on the Short Story, ed. by Rick Feddersen, Susan Lohafer, Barbara Lounsberry and Mary
Rohrberger (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, Praeger, 1998), pp. ix-xii. See also Erik van
Achter, Revising Theory: Poes Legacy in Short Story Criticism, in Short Story Theories:
A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. by Viorica Patea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp.
75-88.
2
Mary Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre (The Hague:
Mouton, 1966), p. 11.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.14
4The Classic Short Story
E. May put together a collection of essays that made him a powerful

advocate of a genre that he described as mythic and spiritual [] intuitive
and lyrical.3 In these works, critics of the contemporary story found a
description of what they saw and appreciated in late twentieth century
stories. The scholars had what seemed to be a complete view of the form:
stretching back from Frederick Barthelme and Alice Munro to Virginia
Woolf, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and Anton Chekhov, and rooted
in Hawthornes invention of the genre at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
This apparently comprehensive view of the genre, however, left a crucial
missing link: critics tend to ignore the end of nineteenth century, despite
the fact that this period has a strong claim as a major stage if not the major
stage of the form. There is of course nothing ground-breaking in such
an assertion: it is well documented that the short story was enormously
popular at this time, and that innumerable periodicals were publishing
countless stories.4 It was also the time when more masters of the form were
active than perhaps at any other time: Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Luigi
Pirandello, Henry James, Mori gai and Akutagawa Rynosuke, to name
just a few.5 The particular form of the genre has also been recognised. In
1985, Clare Hanson reminded us with force that not only was the short
story of that time important, but also that it had initiated a whole tradition
in itself: the short story, as opposed to short fiction.6
Yet compared to the wealth and importance of these stories in their
time, critical appraisals of this form have been very few.7 The classic short
3
Charles E. May (ed.), Short Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976). The
quote is from Charles E. May, The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction, in The New
Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp.
131-43 (p. 133).
4
Between 1885 and 1901 the publication numbers for cheap magazines in the United States
went from 3,600 to 7,500. See Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American
Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). In Europe, the figures are
maybe even more impressive: in Italy alone, about 1,800 periodicals were published in
1891; in France, several papers had a circulation of nearly one million by 1900. On all this,
and on the consequences for the form itself, see Part II.
5
Throughout the book, Japanese names will be given following the academic habit of
using the surname first followed by the given name.
6
Throughout this period [1880-1980], despite the development of Symbolist and
Modernist short story forms, the traditional tale continued to appear. Indeed, the major
point which I wish to make about this period is that it is possible to distinguish in it two
quite separate lines of development in the short story. Clare Hanson, Short Stories and
Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985), p. 5.
7
The form widely studied is that which is, to use Mays words, essential and seldom
Introduction 5
story tradition is often dismissed, in one word, as pertaining only to the

naturalistic story or as being, in Rohrbergers words, only simple
narrative.8 Only a few writers have had their stories studied in any detail,
while the short stories of Naturalists like mile Zola, Gerhart Hauptmann
and Giovanni Verga so influential across Europe have been largely
ignored, as have Leonid Andreyev, Nikolai Leskov and Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin. Even Pirandello and Maupassants short stories have been paid
only cursory glances. And even for the authors that are the focus of short
story studies, only a handful of their stories are analysed. To take Chekhov
as an example, only a few of his stories, especially from the later period of his
career, from Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with Lapdog, 1899) to Nevest (Bethrothed,
1903, his last story), are widely cited, even though he wrote a hundred or
so stories in his major period alone these epiphanic stories have
become the focus of analysis rather than his classic stories.9
As a global study of the classic form was still missing, I undertook
to concentrate on the short story at this time of its greatest efflorescence,
across a number of different countries and languages, working with a
corpus of more than a thousand stories. This research led me to see that
this classic short story, albeit with infinitely various surface features,
was built on a constant structure, had a characteristic relationship with its
readers, and a generic outlook on its subject. This was nearly universal. It
read. Charles E. May, Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are Seldom
Read, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. by Per
Winther, Jakob Lothe and Hans H. Skei (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press, 2004), pp. 14-25. The classic short story, written by artists that have been
extraordinarily influential in their time, and which was universally read, is scarcely
studied. Hansons work is a brilliant exception, but she writes on English writers alone,
and soon proceeds to the description of short fiction rather than the classic short story.
My research concurs with many of her results: from the characters tend[ing] to be
viewed externally, to the subject tending to be the strange [] in human personality,
to the narrative symmetry, and the importance of plot in these classic stories, and
to the fact that the stories depend on a fundamental agreement between reader and
writer. See Hanson (1985), p. 6.
8
May argues that The narrative and description in the first two thirds of the story [James
Joyces The Dead] suggests that the story will end naturalistically with the end of the
party. However []. Charles E. May, The Secret Life in the Modern Short Story, in
Contemporary Debates on the Short Story, ed. by Jos R. Ibez, Jos Francisco Fernndez
and Carmen M. Bretones (Bern: Lang, 2007), pp. 207-25 (p. 217). Rohrberger draws the
distinction between the short story as epiphany and the simple narrative. Mary
Rohrberger, Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story: How I
Got Hooked on the Short Story and Where It Led Me, in The Art of Brevity (2004), pp.
1-13 (p. 5).
9
This is after a very prolific period in the small press, to which Chekhov contributed
under a pseudonym more than five hundred stories and anecdotes.
was not a question of giving a definition of the short story: many critics have
stressed that this would not be very interesting, even if it were possible.
It was a question of describing the tools of brevity in this particular form,
and the relationship between the reader, the author, and the spectacle that
one puts before the other. This survey showed that Chekhov and James,
even in their greatest stories, used the same tools as Maupassant or Verga.
Chekhovs Lady with Lapdog is making a particularly powerful use of the
antithetic structure common to classic short stories; Jamess The Figure in
the Carpet is particularly representative of the paroxystic representation of
short story characters.10
To test my hypothesis, and disengage the in-depth characteristics of this
form, the first requirement seemed to me to survey in detail an international
selection of the greatest short story authors. I chose to look at the entire
body of stories of five major authors, one in each of the languages with
which I was familiar (French, Russian, Italian, English and Japanese):
Maupassant, Chekhov, Verga, James and Akutagawa. Maupassant was an
obvious choice as he has largely been figured by critics as the master of
the classic short story, as well as Chekhov, who is seen to embody short
fiction (or the modern short story as I call it).11 Verga was also an obvious
choice, because he is such a popular author in his home country and because,
unlike many classic short story writers, his work has been analysed by
great critics from Luigi Russo to Leo Spitzer and the progressive Marxists.12
James was not only central to the discussion of the form by Anglophone
critics, but also made what is maybe the most exquisite use of the form.
In Japan, Mori gai was my first choice, since he was one of the greatest
authors of the time; but instead I decided to focus on Akutagawa because,
like Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote both classic stories and short
fiction.13
10 Considering that I am treating short stories as works of art in their own right, and that
they are often published separately, I have italicised their titles rather than putting them
in inverted commas. When I am speaking of a cycle or sequence of short stories, I shall
say so.
11 It is difficult in English to find a word to specify this type of short story without entering
into the debate on modernism/postmodernism. What I mean by modern is a story
that renounces the anecdote, and thus, the classic format. I discuss this in detail in the
books epilogue.
12 I also looked at the complete short works of Pirandello, because it was interesting to see
that even an author who was central to the renewal of the theatrical form used the most
classic tools when writing short stories.
13 Akutagawas career began a little later than the others: his first texts date from 1914.
Introduction 7
The second step was to place these great authors in the context of
their time: to read Maupassant along with Alphonse Daudet, and James
along with Rudyard Kipling. More importantly, I decided to read them
in the same place as the audience of the time: in the newspapers and the
intellectual journals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This was more fruitful than I could have imagined. First, it allowed me
to see these stories in the vicinity of the other genres of the newspapers
(chronicles, reports, anecdotes, etc), with which they have interesting
resemblances and differences. Secondly, it explained what is maybe the
essential feature of the classic short story: its exoticism. Most of these
stories deal with characters that are in some ways removed from the reader
(either by place, time, race or class).
Modern short stories that follow less generic conventions may very
well be more satisfying for twenty-first century readers than the classic form.
Throughout this book, I shall not shy away from acknowledging the classic
short storys limitations: these stories can be extraordinarily powerful, but
the form is also somewhat stifling. However, the very fact that the greatest
authors of the time abundantly and continuously produced classic short
stories should draw our attention to the possibilities of the form. They did
great things with potentially restrictive structural laws. In doing so, they
were part of a democratisation of literature: this was a form that could
be read, like the serial, by a large number of readers but which could
also give quick, swift pleasure to readers accustomed to more demanding
writing.
The authors that I am focussing on in this book participated in the
Naturalist periods criticism of what they perceived to be the backward
state of their countries. Verga and Chekhov published throughout their
lives in intellectual journals (tolstye zhurnaly or thick journals as they
were called in Russia) where their stories were side-by-side with austere
articles about science and statistics, and their possible application to ease
the nations poverty. Maupassant and the French Naturalists, from Paul
Alexis to Zola, published in newspapers that sometimes bore the very
title of Le Progrs (The Progress), and the transformation of the nation was
paramount in their minds. The short story gave them a powerful tool for
denunciation of a state of society they felt was unbearable. Yet paradoxically
these stories often played the role of reinforcing the social and sometimes
racial prejudices of the reader. It was precisely this drawback that led
to the forms deconstruction in the twentieth century. The greatness of the
authors studied in this book lies in their having become sensible to this
stifling effect of the classic form, and having opened new avenues to the
genre. Maupassant, for example, experimented with the form in his tales
of madness and Chekhov wrote stories based on a dilemma, thus putting
into question the very idea of a stable, affirmative self and the superiority
of one voice over the others. But this should not lead us to forget that this
was only one part of their work, and that they also led long and admirable
careers as classic short story writers.
This book shall approach the classic short story from three different and
complementary perspectives: its structure; its site of first publication; and
the relationship it creates between author, reader and characters. Part I is
dedicated to structure. In Chapter One, we shall see that characterisation
in the short story is always paroxystic. There are few narrative elements
in the classic short story but every trait is there in its extreme form; even
mediocre men are mediocre par excellence. Chapter Two will show that the
classic short story is based on a fundamental antithesis, which creates a
powerful tension. This may be achieved through a narrative reversal, or
the contrast between two characters (for example, Jekyll and Hyde) or
between two world visions (for example, European and American). This
is the essential point from which to understand the twist-in-the-tail,
which will be the focus of Chapter Three. The reason that the ending of the
short story is so powerful is because it brings into contact the two poles
of the antithesis, the two opposites that should never come into contact.
The surprise ending simply unleashes the accumulated tension that has
been building throughout the story. Chapter Four will analyse the means
through which the short story accelerates our entry into the narrative. In
order to help the reader immediately understand the scene, these stories
often resort to preconstructed material, including stereotypes (not
necessarily literary types, but understood social types). They are also very
focussed, eliminating everything that is not their subject.
The second part of the book will analyse the short story within the
framework of the media in which it first appeared: newspapers and
intellectual journals. Chapter Six presents a detailed review of the mostly
expensive, elegant periodicals that were the primary publishing outlet for
the short stories of our corpus. These stories that focus on peasants, poor
office workers, prostitutes and provincials were for the most part read by
wealthy urbanites. These periodicals also published travelogues which
will be the focus of Chapter Seven in which a chronicler introduced
Introduction 9
his readers to a foreign country. Often the writers in our corpus wrote
factual travelogues at the same time as their fictional stories, creating in
both a similar distance between the reader and the exotic characters being
depicted.
It is this distance that will be the focus of the final section of the book:
Part III looks at the relationship between the reader, the author and the
characters of the classic short story. The main feature of the genre is its
monologism only the author (or narrator) has a full and autonomous
voice, whereas the characters in all their otherness are put at a distance.
Chapters Eight and Nine will concentrate on rhetorical devices that are
used to create distance from the characters even though many of these
devices (such as the use of direct speech and dialect) are often thought of as
creating intimacy. Chapter Ten looks at the intermediary role the narrator
and/or the reflector play in creating the sense of distance between reader
and author, as the reader joins with the (reliable) narrator to look down
upon the other characters in the tale. Chapter Eleven attempts to define the
special kind of emotion aroused in the short story. Although the reader may
feel sympathy for certain characters, our compassion almost never results
from a true understanding; they are never our equals, but are doomed to
represent social or psychological types. The conclusion to Part III will show
that even the short stories of Dostoevsky the herald of polyphony are
still monological. Monologism is not a feature of our authors but of the
genre itself.
The epilogue to the book will hint at the way in which the short story
would transform itself out of its effective but restrictive framework into
the twentieth century. The stories I call modern, as opposed to classic,
renounce most of the traits described in this book. Structure is no longer
based on antitheses and paroxysms, and, most importantly, polyphony
can re-enter the scene. When the nineteenth-century belief in reason and
progress gave way to a fundamental uncertainty about the subject, the
short story lost its firm grasp on easily defined characters. Instead of telling
neatly manufactured little tales, it preferred to turn to the exploration of
uncertain and complex minds.
PART I: STRUCTURE
1. Paroxystic Characterisation
At the end of the nineteenth century, through the influence of Naturalism,

literature was striving to become the science of the human heart, and
as a consequence many critics and writers began to condemn rhetoric.1
In The Experimental Novel (1880), using Claude Bernard as a guide, mile
Zola called his fellow writers to become observers in the spirit of the
physiologist.2 He urged writers to renounce rhetoric, if not style: The
observer relates purely and simply the phenomena which he has under
his eyes He should be the photographer of phenomena, his observation
should be an exact representation of nature.3 As a consequence, the
periods motto was simplicity. The ancient school of writing began to be
identified with rhetorical pomposity,4 and Zolas call for the aesthetics of
slice of life Naturalism is well known:
1 See, for example, Giovanni Verga, The She-Wolf and Other Stories, trans. by Giovanni
Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 87 (hereafter Cecchetti).
For the original Italian, see Giovanni Verga, Tutte le Novelle, ed. by Carla Ricciardi, 2
vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), I, p. 192 (hereafter Ricciardi). Verga is one of the greatest
proponents of this radical Italian Naturalist school of Verism.
2 See mile Zola, The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, trans. by Belle M. Sherman (New
York: Cassell, 1893); and Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental
Medicine, trans. by Henry Copley Greene (Birmingham, AL: Classics of Medicine Library,
1980). Zola said, I only repeat what I have said before, that apart from the matter of
form and style, the experimental novelist is only one special kind of savant, who makes
use of the tools of all other savants, observation and analysis (p. 50).
3
Ibid, p. 6.
4
We are actually rotten with lyricism; we are very much mistaken when we think that
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.1

Instead of imagining an adventure, of complicating it, of arranging stage
effects, which scene by scene will lead to a final conclusion, you simply take
the life study of a person or a group of persons, whose actions you faithfully
depict. The work becomes a report, nothing more; it has but the merit of
exact observation, of more or less profound penetration and analysis, of
the logical connection of facts. Sometimes, even, it is not an entire life, with
a commencement and an ending, of which you tell; it is only a scrap of an
existence, a few years in the life of a man or a woman, a single page in a
human history, which has attracted the novelist in the same way that the
special study of a mineral can attract a chemist.5
The short story writers, even outside the Naturalist school, readily adopted
this new stripped-back aesthetic.6
This is, of course, very different from the preceding period of the short
story genre: Goethe had characterised his Novelle as a peculiar and as yet
unheard-of event,7 while Edgar Allan Poe had defined it through its effect
on the reader, stressing the necessity of both the unity and the intensity of
this artificial product of human art.8 The end of the nineteenth century, to
the contrary, proclaims its essential simplicity. Critics, theoreticians and
writers (often one and the same) insist firmly that the short story should
renounce all artifice, and that it should tell simple things simply: Anton
Chekhov claimed that the short story should tell how Peter married
Mary,9 and Giovanni Verga argued that the short story should be free
the characteristic of a good style is a sublime confusion with just a dash of madness
added; in reality, the excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness (ibid, p.
48).
5
Ibid, p. 124 (emphases mine).
6
Among the authors of our corpus only Maupassant and Verga can be said to be truly
Naturalists, although, as we shall see in Part III, that conscience of contributing to
progress was shared by most short story writers of the time.
7
Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. by John Oxenford, ed. by J.
K. Moorhead (London: Dent, 1930), p. 163. The original German reads [] denn was
ist Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete, unerhrte Begebenheit. Johann Peter Eckermann,
Gesprche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981), p. 207.
8
Having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought
out, [the skilful literary artist] then invents such incidents he then combines such
events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. Edgar Allen Poe,
Essays and Reviews, ed. by Gary R. Thompson (New York: The Library of America, 1984).
9
Chekhovs saying, that appeared in a book of souvenirs of Chekhov by Alexander Kuprin,
is often quoted, for example in Sean OFaolain, The Short Story (Cork: Mercier, 1948),
p. 100. Why write, Chekhov wondered, about a man getting into a submarine []
while his beloved at that moment throws herself with a hysterical shriek from the belfry?
All this is untrue and does not happen in reality. One must write about simple things:
how Peter Semionovitch married Marie Ivanovna. That is all. Maxim Gorky, Alexander
Kuprin and A. I. Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov, trans. by S. S. Koteliansky and
Leonard Woolf (New York: Huebsch, 1921), p. 80. Available at http://archive.org/details/
Paroxystic Characterisation15
from all rhetoric.10 Leo Tolstoy, for his part, considered that the short story
was simply the rendition of how she came to love him.11
The most interesting opinion for us is Vergas, because it is articulated
and developed in a famous short story, constantly quoted in Italian criticism:
LAmante di Gramigna (Gramignas Mistress).12 Immediately after developing
his theory of the art text as the offspring of Zolas Le Roman exprimental,
Verga introduces Gramignas Mistress as an illustrative model of what the
modern text should be. The short story, in itself a fragment, is particularly
suited to meet Zolas requirements. It is not expected to cover everything
on its subject, nor to elaborate; it will offer the reader a partial but revealing
insight into the life of its characters. It can be a human document, given
to the reader in its rough form: an unadorned account whose value lies in
its truth.13
In his theoretical preamble to Gramignas Mistress, written as a letter
to his fellow writer Salvatore Farina, Verga argues first for simplicity
of subjects in the short story: the setting must be from everyday life, its
heroes chosen from ordinary people. Then he also insists there should be
simplicity of treatment: the reader must be put face to face with the naked
and unadulterated fact and will not have to work through the authors
interpretation. The short story is a linear account, where the hand of the
artist will remain absolutely invisible.14 As a contribution to the science of
the human heart, it is the ideal form for presenting a slice of life. In other
reminiscencesan00bunigoog (accessed 22/10/13).
10 The story is a human document [a] naked and unadulterated fact, of which the
writer will give only the point of departure and that of arrival. Cechetti, pp. 86-87
(Ricciardi, p. 191). Here and later, page references are given first to the translation, then
to the original in brackets.
11 Tolstoy wrote this in a letter to the poet Afanasy Fet in October 1859. Lev Nicolayevich
Tolstoy, Sochineniia, 90 vols (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1935-1964), LX, p.
307 (translation ours).
12 Cechetti, pp. 86-94 (Ricciardi, pp. 191-99). This short story is a real landmark in Italian
literature. See, for example, Giuseppe Lo Castro, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Saggi
brevi di letteratura antica e moderna, vol. 5 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001), pp.
56-59. The 1896 translation by Nathan Haskell Dole is in Under the Shadow of Etna: Sicilian
Stories from the Italian of Giovanni Verga (Boston: Joseph Knight, 1896), pp. 1-19 (under
the title How Peppa Loved Gramigna). It can also be read online at http://archive.org/
stream/undershadowofetn00vergrich#page/n23/mode/2up (accessed 29/07/13).
13 In Vergas words: I shall repeat it to you just as I picked it up along the paths in the
countryside, with nearly the same simple and picturesque words that characterise
popular narration, and you will certainly prefer to find yourself face to face with the
naked and unadulterated fact, without having to look for it between the lines of the
book, through the lens of the writer. Cechetti, p. 86 (Ricciardi, p. 191).
14 Ibid, pp. 86-87 (p. 191).
words and Verga insists on this point it must renounce grandiloquent

effects in favour of psychological truth.15
But this constantly proclaimed simplicity and denial of rhetoric does
not withstand a close reading of the short stories written at the end of the
nineteenth century. Vergas theory and Chekhovs commentaries, like far
too many authors comments on their texts, are accepted as ready currency,
a definitive description of their work. In this chapter we shall see that the
classic short story, far from being unadorned, relies heavily on rhetorical
techniques and paroxystic effects. The claim of simplicity corresponds to
reality as far as themes and scope are concerned; in this regard the short
story is truly an economical genre and all the commentators rightly stress
the small number of characters and events and, during this period, their
commonplace character. But these very elements are always characterised
in excess, they are what they are prodigiously every state, every quality,
every feeling is carried to the ultimate. This is not simply a feature of
Italian Verism but rather the standard way of dealing with narrative
material in the short story: Henry James and Chekhov will bear witness
to this. The following chapters will show why the short story is in need of
this aggrandizement of its objects, and how it uses it to achieve brevity. It
will remain to be shown, in the conclusion of this section, how the short
story makes its reader forget, in the excitement of the narrative, both its
extremism and the extremely rhetorical structure in which it is used.
Since Vergas theory is quoted constantly by Italian critics from Luigi
Capuana and Luigi Russo on, it is worthwhile testing it by beginning with
an examination of the short story Gramignas Mistress, by which Verga
illustrates his manifesto.16 The three characters in the story are Sicilians:
two peasants and one brigand. However, they are not merely ordinary
Sicilians, representatives of the anonymous masses. Peppa is rich and one
of the most beautiful girls of Licodia; she is supposed to marry the most
15 Ibid, pp. 87-88 (pp. 191-92). This idea of truth and spontaneity is still often stressed in
the insistence on the short storys filiation with oral story-telling, which is considered
the model of the spontaneous text. The classic reference is to W. Somerset Maugham,
Points of View (London: Heinemann, 1938), p. 147. See also Valerie Shaw, The Short
Story: A Critical Introduction (London: Longman, 1983). In her chapter entitled Artless
Narration, Shaw insists on the absence of rhetoric and the proximity of the audience.
See also Eduard Anatolevich Shubin, Sovremennyi russkii rasskaz: voprosy poetiki zhanra
(Moscow: Nauka, 1974).
16 Goethe similarly offered his Novelle as an example of the genre. See Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Great Writings of Goethe, ed. by Stephen Spender, trans. by Christopher
Middleton (New York: New American Library, 1958), pp. 138-60.
desired bachelor in the village, nicknamed Tallow Candle because of his

wealth.17 Instead she abruptly decides to partner with Gramigna, a rebel
who is terrorising the region. Gramigna is far from simply being someone
who robs people and who just happens to marry someone called Peppa,
as Verga suggests in his preamble to the story. Throughout the beginning
of the story, he is increasingly portrayed as a prodigy: he becomes the
ultimate rebel, of superhuman proportions. He is a thief, but not content
just to live off his pillaging: he terrorises an entire province. Not a single
peasant from one end of the province to the other dares to harvest his
crop for fear of Gramignas bloody vengeance. Even his name (Italian for
crab grass) places him automatically in opposition to the peasants: a
name as cursed as the grass that bears it.18
The story soon gives Gramigna the stature of the paladins of former
times: he was alone, but he was worth ten [] he alone, Gramigna, was
never tired, never slept.19 He is immediately shown as far superior to those
hunting him. But the text does not stop there, it withdraws him from human
references; the hero will finally reach the very level of primordial elements:
He slunk like a wolf down the beds of dry creeks [] for two hundred miles
around ran the legend of his deeds [] he alone against a thousand, tired,
hungry, burning with thirst in the immense burnt plain, under the June
sun.20
This enlargement characterises all the signifying elements of the described

world. The harvests they are protecting from him are exceptional:
the wheat was a joy to look at, if only Gramigna wouldnt set it on fire,
and that the wicker [basket] by the bed wouldnt be large enough to hold all
the grain of the harvest.21
A mass of troops is assembled against him. Faced with the terror he inspires,
the Prefect calls up the officers of all the reserves to hunt him:
Carabinieri, soldiers and cavalrymen had been after him for two months
[] patrols and squads were immediately in motion, sentries were placed
along every ditch and behind every wall [] by day, by night, on foot, on
horseback, and by telegraph.22
17 Cechetti, p. 89 (Ricciardi, pp. 193-94).
18 Ibid, p. 88 (p. 192). Verga, in an early version, called his hero Raja. The change in name
makes it more powerful: he is the typical enemy of the peasants.
19 Ibid, pp. 88-89 (p. 193).
20 Ibid, p. 89 (p. 193).
21 Ibid, p. 90 (p. 194).
22 Ibid, p. 88 (p. 193).
The mention of the telegraph contributes to the impression of universality:

even the air is involved. The difficulty of the hunt is repeatedly emphasised:
The carabinieris horses dropped dead tired [...] the patrols slept on their
feet.23
This represents more or less the entire text of the beginning of the story,
with all the notations on Gramigna and his enemies gathered in a single
page. So it is not just a question of salient features, scattered throughout a
portrait to give it more vigour, but of the very spirit of this portrait, which
is not a representation of a man of the people, nor even the description of
a rebel, but the creation of an almost mythic character, beyond any normal
bounds: in short, an abstraction. By the end of this page, Gramigna is the
Rebel par excellence, the personification of the evil hero. The story treats
the character Tallow Candle in the same way. At first he is characterised
as the best match in the village, but he is soon beyond any comparisons
with his peers. He too is associated with superhuman imagery: he is as big
and beautiful as the sun, and his unusual strength enables him to carry
the banner of Saint Margaret without bending his back, as if he were a
pillar.24
Could this be a series of clichs not to be taken literally? Are they
simply the exaggerations of this spicy, popular story that Verga claimed
was a peasant tale in which he had changed almost none of the simple
and picturesque terms?25 If so, there would be no reason to take these
paroxysms at face value. But, in fact, the accumulation of prodigious
elements is such as to force us to take each of them at face value. At the
end of this portrait of Gramigna, we are led to endow an expression such
as he never slept with its full meaning, because each element reinforces
the other: from the enormity of the troops opposing him, we unconsciously
come to the conclusion that Gramigna really is more than a man, and we
attribute to him a thirst which equals the immense plain and a wakefulness
that surpasses the human condition. On the other hand, given his own
heroic stature, both the enemy forces and the wealth of the bridegroom
become absolutes: every possible police and army unit; the very richest
young people.26 We are given only extremes, and the tissue they finally
23 Ibid, p. 89 (p. 193).
24 Ibid, p. 90 (p. 194).
25 Ibid, p. 86 (p. 191).
26 Claude Gandelman describes the phenomenon in Kafka: In Kafka, the metaphors of
current language help to make an unreal literary situation accepted as the most normal
thing in the world, since it already exists in the language. [] Only, in Kafka, these
weave bears the mark of this paroxysm in its entirety. If exaggerations were
removed, there would be nothing left.
As a consequence, the narrative itself takes on something of the absolute:
it is the manhunt par excellence that we are following. In the same way, we
glide from the idea that Gramigna is at the centre of all conversations, to
the idea that he is the only subject: wherever people met, they spoke only
of him, of Gramigna.27 In the rarefied world of the short story, it is not
enough that the important elements occupy the forefront: they establish
such a strong presence that they conceal all else, and they obliterate
everything that is not a paroxysm like themselves. Like the fairytale, the
short story accustoms us to working with unequivocal entities: paragons
of virtue or vice.28
Even the most subtle authors are no different in their construction of
characters in their short stories. In The Figure in the Carpet, a story from
the height of his maturity as a writer, James is dealing with the subtleties
of a literary subject matter, not with Sicilian peasants and yet he
nevertheless constructs his narrative on an uninterrupted series of
paroxysms.29 The storys narrator, a young critic early in his career, is told
by the writer Hugh Vereker that throughout his work there is a secret
thread, like a complex figure in a Persian carpet, which gives it its value.
The narrator does his best to discover the secret but fails, although one of
his colleagues, the critic Corvick, manages to solve the mystery.
Even in a short story like this, which at the beginning is relatively
subdued, intense instances of hyperbole become natural, almost
inescapable. Vereker is initially presented simply as a good writer, even
linguistic metaphors are taken literally and even become mens destiny (concerning
this vermin Gregor Samsa). Claude Gandelman, Les Techniques de la provocation chez
quelques romanciers et nouvellistes de lentre-deux-guerres (doctoral thesis, Paris III SorbonneNouvelle, 1972), p. 110 (translation ours).
27 Cechetti, p. 89 (Ricciardi, p. 193).
28 As is evident in the above-mentioned Novelle by Goethe, which accumulates extremes,
and explicitly says them to be so: A new extraordinary object again merits our attention;
miraculously; no man ever saw a royal tiger laid out to sleep so splendidly as you
lie now. Goethe (1958), p. 252. For the inheritance of this idea from ancient genres
(exemplum, tale and fable), see Hans-Jrg Neuschafer, Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle:
Strukturen der Kurzerzhlung auf der Schwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Munich:
Fink Verlag, 1983); Andr Sempoux, La Nouvelle, in Typologie des sources du moyen ge
occidental, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), ch. 9; and Salvatore Battaglia, Dallesempio alla
novella, in Filologia Romanza, 7 (1960), 45-82; also in La coscienza letteraria del Medioevo
(Naples: Liguori, 1965), pp. 487-548.
29 Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (London:
Rupert Hart Davis, 1960), IX, pp. 273-315 (hereafter Edel).
though, in general, James usually announces from the outset that his author
characters are geniuses.30 Here he merely says: He was awfully clever []
but he wasnt a bit the biggest of the lot.31 However, the entire beginning
of the text proceeds steadily to build Vereker into a genius, and the search
for his secret is depicted as a feat of total dedication and self-sacrifice on the
part of the narrator and Corvick.
Jamess plainly prodigious terms are not so different from those in
Gramignas Mistress. The narrator, who thinks its enough to have passed
half the night in reading Verekers book before he writes his review, is
called to order by the writer whom he meets at a ladys house and told that
he didnt see anything of the work. This conversation makes it possible
gradually to portray the man and his secret, the figure, as a wonder of
merit: Triumph of patience and ingenuity [] the finest, fullest intention
of all his works is, in the Masters eyes, an exquisite scheme.32 The apparent
and temporary modesty of Vereker, who in the beginning called his
figure a little trick, is merely a means of establishing a crescendo; from
the next page on he gives up this pose.33 To the narrator who asks him You
mean its a beauty so rare, so great?, he replies the loveliest thing in the
world;34 and we know the force of beauty and lovely in James.
This conversation arouses extraordinary emotion in the young writer,
and is a real turning point in the short story: from then on he will reread
the entire work, despair, look again, and then give up, but not without
reporting the conversation to Corvick, the critic who gave him the review
to write in his place. Nevertheless, this conversation says nothing about
the nature of the secret, nor about the nature or ambition of the work of
art. Its effect is to place the man and his work in the light of the absolute,
to make Vereker into the Author par excellence, as Gramigna was the
Rebel.
The rest of the short story takes very seriously indeed the statement of
the prodigious value of the figure in the work. After the pure and simple
affirmation of that paroxystic value, it is the very structure of the text
which will take on the role of making it a marvel. For this, it will use what
semioticians have called narrative saturation: all of the potentialities
30 In, for example, The Death of the Lion (Edel, IX, pp. 77-118) or The Lesson of the Master
(Edel, VII, pp. 213-84).
31 Edel, IX, p. 275.
32 Ibid, pp. 281-82.
33 Ibid, p. 282.
34 Ibid, p. 285.
of a situation are exploited in turn, all the terms set by the narration are
linked with each other.35 After the narrator has failed, Corvick passionately
takes up the quest to uncover the mystery figure himself. He joins with his
fiance Gwendolen in a search so intense that the narrators initial efforts
look somewhat weak. Not content with rereading the twenty volumes, they
read them page by page, as they would take one of the classics; inhale
him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in.36 Gwendolen says of
Corvick: he knows every page, as I do, by heart.37
As with Verga, this is not some spicy exaggeration with no real
significance. The short story takes its emphatic assertions literally and
ultimately gives the words their fullest, if extreme, meaning. The proof of
this is that Corvick discovers the secret when he is on a journey to India,
and has not taken the twenty volumes with him. On solving the mystery,
he leaves India immediately, giving up the large fee he had been offered to
write an article there. Corvick proclaims that he will share the secret with
Gwendolen, but only after he is married to her.38 He also agrees to tell the
narrator, but then only in person. The narrator has to go abroad to attend a
sick brother; and by the time he returns, Corvick is dead.
Everything then conspires to prevent the narrator (and reader) from
discovering the secret: the widow has been told, but she refuses to speak
about it to anyone. When all efforts at persuasion have failed, the narrator
even considers marrying her. Faced with Gwendolens refusal, he thinks of
marrying Verekers widow, whom he has never seen, and about whom he
knows nothing. The two women die one after the other, and he turns to the
second husband of Corvicks widow. This is the surprise ending of the
story: the husband learns for the first time of the secrets existence and its
extraordinary importance. Both of them are in despair, but the narrators is
tempered by the pleasure of supposing that the second husband is perhaps
even more frustrated than he.
35 See, for example, Stephen Hutchings, A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid
Andreev: 1900-1909 (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1990).
36 Edel, IX, p. 2.
37 Ibid, p. 297.
38 Vereker had already associated the possibility of discovering the figure with the intensity
of Corvick and Gwendolens love. Convinced that no one, ever, would discover the
secret before his death, he does nevertheless consider what he is told about the almost
mystic quality of Corvick and his fiances search, and says that if they love each other
so much that they will marry then it is possible that they may really bring the figure to
light.
One characteristic of the classic short story is that the paroxysm

permeates the entire narrative, affecting not only the heroes, but also all the
elements that play a role in the narration. Here, it affects Corvicks projected
study of Vereker, which will be the greatest literary portrait ever painted
as well as the role of the secret for Corvicks widow (a real counterpoise
to her grief), or the singularity of Corvick himself: if Corvick had broken
down I should never know; no one would be of any use if he wasnt.39
James goes so far as to defy logic in order to magnify everything, as in his
characterisation of the secret once it has been discovered:
When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made
you ashamed; and there hadnt been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the
age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest
reason why it should have been overlooked.40
This is tantamount to denying the gigantic task imposed on Corvick and

his fiance, a task that would only shed light for Corvick much later, and
never for the young woman.
One comes across this phenomenon so often in the classic short story
that it is as if authors could not escape it: banality itself is expressed in
the most extreme ways. Chekhovs Skuchnaya istoriya (A Boring Story), for
example, seems almost automatically to assume the marks of paroxysm.41
The example is particularly remarkable because the subject is truly simple,
similar to Chekhovs description of the ideal short story as how Peter
married Mary: it describes the human anguish of a sixty-two-year-old
man who knows that he is fatally ill. Chekhov often repeated in his letters
that he wished that this anguish were accessible to his reader. Yet, from the
very first line, the portrait that the doctor draws of himself bears the stamp
of the prodigious:
There is in Russia an eminent professor [ a] privy counselor, who has been
awarded many decorations in his lifetime; indeed, he possesses so many
Russian and foreign orders that whenever he has to put them all on, the
students call him the iconostasis. [] [For at least 25-30 years] there has not
been a single famous scholar or scientist in Russia with whom he has not
been intimately acquainted. [] He is an honorary Fellow of all the Russian
39 Edel, IX, p. 295.

40 Ibid, p. 300.
41 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, trans. by David
Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1964), pp. 46-104 (hereafter Magarshack). For the text in
its original Russian, see Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30
vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-1983), VII, pp. 251-310 (hereafter Nauka).
[] universities. [] This name of mine is well known []. It is among
those few fortunate names which it is considered bad taste to abuse [] my
name is closely associated with the idea of a man who is famous.42
I have emphasised here the most salient words and phrases, those that
obviously hinder us from thinking of the hero as just Peter. This process
will underlie the presentation of all the textual elements: this again is not a
side addition, a pleasant way to highlight a self-portrait; it is a fundamental
feature of the narrative fabric. To reflect the commonplace world around us,
the author accumulates paroxysms into a compact mass. Each of the texts
elements could be mentioned; all of them are used in their extreme form.
From the narrators disgust with himself to the extraordinary memory of
the beadle he meets every time he goes to the university, to the portrait
of the parasite who wants to marry his daughter (he has neither a job,
nor any real family, his only quality is complacency) or the extraordinary
enthusiasm and pleasure felt by the narrator when he teaches:
No debate, no entertainment, no game has ever given me so much pleasure
as giving a lecture [...] And I cant help thinking that Hercules, after the most
sensational of his exploits, never had such an exquisite feeling of lassitude as I
experienced every time after a lecture.43
The effect of these superlatives is sometimes reinforced by other means

for example, the contrast between the damning portrait of his aging wife,
and the evocation of her youthful perfection:
Bewildered, I ask myself: Is it possible that this very fat, clumsy old woman,
whose dull expression is so full of petty cares and anxiety about a crust of
bread, whose eyes are blurred with perpetual thoughts of debts and poverty,
who can only talk of expenses and only smile when things get cheaper is
it possible that this woman was once that very slim Varya, whom I loved so
passionately for her fine, clear intellect, her pure soul, her beauty, and as
Othello loved Desdemona [her compassion for the Science I served]?44
As in Verga, the drive for extremes is indicated by superhuman comparisons.

The column, the sun, Hercules or Othello play the role of impossibilia in
ancient lyric poetry: guarantees of the extraordinary, they draw the object
away from possible comparisons, and make of it an absolute.
42 Magarshack, p. 46 (emphases mine) (Nauka, VII, p. 251).

43 Ibid, pp. 56-57 (emphases mine) (pp. 262-63).
44 Ibid, p. 49 (p. 255).
Extremes in the fantastic short story

The short story format is particularly suited to the fantastic.45 In the whole
course of this book, we shall see that fantastic stories and stories of madness
make a peculiar use of the features of the short story, and in many ways
deconstruct the very system of the genre. What we have just seen in this
chapter is that, in the realist story, every feature is pushed to its extreme
to the point where it becomes almost abstract. Characters are prodigiously
what they are, to the extent that they are bordering on the prodigy. In the
fantastic story, the high-intensity descriptions will cross that border. Here,
the subject will be not so much the characters in themselves, but rather the
sensations and emotions they feel and make us feel.
Let us take just one quick look at a story to which we will return in
Chapter Three, and which gives a good example of this crossing of the
border between the abstract and the fantastic: Maupassants Sur leau (On
the River).46 Maupassant tells the story of a passionate fishermen, for whom
the extreme beauty of the river is such that it carries with it a real magic
and the word must be understood in its deeper sense. Every element in
the description is made through the paroxystic descriptions we are now
used to seeing in the classic short story either realistic or fantastic. First,
Maupassant emphasises the characters deep passion for the river: his
heart was full of an all-absorbing, irresistible, devouring passion a love
for the river. Then, the alluring quality of the river itself: To him it means
mystery, the unknown, a land of mirage and phantasmagoria. Finally,
there is the rivers danger: the river is a cemetery without graves.47 In the
same way as the realistic stories accumulate extraordinary references (the
sun, Hercules), here Maupassant quotes five lines of Victor Hugos poem
Oceano Nox, only then to assert that the river is even more threatening
than the powerful ocean: It flows stealthily, without a murmur, and the
eternal, gentle motion of the water is more awful to me than the big ocean
waves.48 An unusually acute silence (the extraordinary stillness that
45 Elizabeth Bowen, for example, talks of finding it as easy to introduce the fantastic into
a short story as it is difficult to do so in a novel. See her preface to A Day in the Dark and
Other Stories (London: Cape, 1965), p. 9.
46 Guy de Maupassant, Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine Artinian
(Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 169-72. The French text can be found in
Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
collection La Pliade, 1974), I, pp. 54-59.
47 Ibid, p. 169 (p. 54).
48 Ibid.
enveloped me) is followed by the most marvelous, stupendous sight

that it is possible to imagine. It was a vision of fairyland, one of those
phenomena that travelers in distant countries tell us about but that we are
unable to believe.49 Nature is described in its most overwhelming forms:
the fog is formed on each side an unbroken hill, six or seven yards in
height, that shone in the moonlight with the dazzling whiteness of snow.50
The descriptions of the supernatural beauty of nature are then followed
by moments of anguish, and the fisherman is gradually seized by terror.
The very stillness is at this moment transformed into a tempest:
the slight pitching of the boat disturbed me. I felt as if it were swaying to and
fro from one side of the river to the other and that an invisible force or being
was drawing it slowly to the bottom and then raising it to let it drop again. I
was knocked about as if in a storm.51
The fact that we are in the midst of prodigies allows supernatural events
to arise: the matter of fact explanations that could account for them (the
fisherman has been drinking, for example) will not prevent the readers
disquiet.
******
The short story never simply tells how someone named Peter married
a woman called Mary. At the end of the nineteenth century the short story
author even seems incapable of telling how such-and-such a man of no
special qualities is unhappy on the eve of his death. What the short story
can tell, to the contrary, and what it repeats from Tolstoys Three Deaths:
A Tale and The Death of Ivan Ilyich to A Boring Story is how such-and-such
a man who had every reason to be happy and knew it, is hurled from this
Capitol onto the Tarpeian Rock of anguish and disgust.
Paroxystic characterisation is a feature widely recognised in hardboiled
magazine stories,52 and this might very well be the reason why this
technique is frequently not discussed in the works of the great authors
49 Ibid, pp. 170 and 171 (pp. 56 and 58).

50 Ibid, p. 171 (p. 59).
51 Ibid, p. 170 (p. 56)
52 Bill Mullen shows that Chester Himess revolutionary success at getting published in
the big magazines of the 1930s, despite endemic racism, was due to his mastering of
the codes of pulp fiction, including the hardboiled (paroxystic) style. Bill Mullen,
Marking Race/Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of
Genre, 1933-1946, in Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. by Julie Brown (New
York: Garland, 1997), pp. 25-46.
(even though, as we will see in Part II, these authors often published their
work in magazines). In magazine stories, critics recognise the extreme
treatment of the narrative material; but they tend to feel that for respectable
authors it is something to be avoided. Even a magazine editor like Rust Hills
explained to would-be writers of short stories that they should not resort
to types (an extension or exaggeration of a commonly-held quality or
manner or accent), at least for their main character.53 We have been trained
by two centuries of the western novel to consider that a great work cannot
use characters without nuances. But the peculiarity of the short story at the
end of nineteenth century is precisely that it does use such paired-down
characters and extreme narratives with great success even under the
pen of the greatest authors like James and Chekhov. We will now look at
one of these paroxystic techniques in more detail: the oxymoronic structure
of the classic short story that, with remarkable economy of means, is able to
drive the storys action from a summit to the bottom of a precipice.
53 Rust Hills, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2000), p. 63. Rust Hills was fiction editor for Esquire from the 1950s to the 1990s. See also
the how-to guides to writing short stories, such as Maren Elwood, Characters Make
Your Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
2. Antithetic Structure
By the paroxystic characterisation we have just observed, the classic short

story makes its characters into the exemplary representatives of their
category: the Rebel and the Rich Young Man; the Great Author and the
Devoted Critic. These become almost abstract entities. What is lost in the
individualisation of the characters, however, is gained in the efficacy of the
plot. The interest shifts from individuals to the development of the story
itself, for which such characters are remarkably well adapted. The essential
feature of the short story then becomes its structure, which, at the period
we are considering in the late nineteenth century, is nearly always based
on antithesis.
Of the thousand stories of this period I have reviewed, almost all are
organised by antithesis at a deeper level. This structuring antithesis is not
a decorative figure of speech, merely there to create a harmonious balance,
but a powerful dynamic device. It is a tension as enormous as the paroxysms
it builds on, and it can be best described in terms borrowed from physics. It
is as if the short story were charging its magnetic poles the narrative
elements through paroxysms. The relationship that is established
between the fully charged poles the magnetic field is more important
than each of the poles themselves. In this way, the narrative structure takes
precedence over the characters. Robert Louis Stevensons Strange Case of Dr
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.2
Jekyll and Mr Hyde is emblematic of this deep antithetical tension.1 In this

most famous of short stories, the reader is very aware of the structuring
force of the antithesis: what has become proverbial is no single trait of
any one of the characters, but the truly radical opposition between the two
characteristics angelic and satanic of the hero. The short storys power
comes from placing an oxymoron the taut coexistence of two opposing
forces on the level of the entire text. Stevenson insists that the doctor is
a true benefactor of humanity, as much as he insists that Hyde is a monster,
because there can be no oxymoron without tension, or lively antithesis
without extremes.
O. Henrys The Gift of the Magi provides another example of symmetrical
characters.2 The extremes are embodied in a couple of young people, Della
and Jim, so poor that they each possess only one item of value. In order to
give the other a worthy gift, each sacrifices this treasure, buying an object
that is meant to enhance the luster of the others prize possession. Della
has only her hair, which she sells to a merchant in order to buy a chain
worthy of Jims Watch (the capital letter is O. Henrys). Jim only possesses
a watch, a treasure that he saved through all his misfortunes; he sells it to
buy Della combs worthy of her hair. When they meet, they discover their
symmetrical sacrifice.
The storys delight comes from the recognition of this symmetry, and
O. Henry dwells on it in his conclusion by praising this reciprocal love that
sacrifices its only treasure to the other. Note that the moment the symmetry
has been declared, the anecdote ends: the effect is achieved, the short story
is complete. This structure is necessary and adequate to the text: its seven
pages call for no further development. And this is also what makes this
text a classic short story. If we had only been given the first part of the
text, it would merely have been an account of a good deed, like many
others found in Christmas issues of early twentieth-century magazines. By
1
See Irving Saposniks insistence on the absolute necessity not to separate the two sides of
the character: [the story] has become the victim of its own success, allowing subsequent
generations to [] see Jekyll or Hyde where one should see Jekyll-Hyde. Saposnik goes
on to show the elaborate structure of the text. Irving S. Saposnik, Robert Louis Stevenson
(New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 88.
2
A much-maligned author, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) is nevertheless regularly
rehabilitated by critics. In Literatura (1927), Boris Eikhenbaum describes The Gift of the
Magi as the archetype of all O. Henrys short stories; see Charles E. May, The New Short
Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 81-88. The Gift of the Magi
can be read via Project Gutenberg: http://www.auburn.edu/~vestmon/Gift_of_the_Magi.
html (accessed 22/10/13).
Antithetic Structure29
adding the second part, O. Henry creates a dramatic knot: by revealing

that Jim has bought combs for the shorn hair, he creates a tension that is
enough to leave the impression of completion. Note also that this symmetry
dispenses with the need to construct complex characters. Della is described
at length at the beginning of the text, but the characterization is no more
than the development of a single concept: that of the Young-Girl-Beautifuland-Beloved. Jim is never described. It is enough for him to be symmetrical
with Della for us to have a clear picture of him. He is her mirror image, a
sort of male Della. We do not need a description, we can create him in our
minds on the same lines as her.3
The juxtaposition of two antithetic poles avoids the need for psychological
justification of the characters actions. In Giovanni Vergas Gramignas
Mistress, which we looked at in the last chapter, we see Peppa suddenly
abandoning her rich fianc, Tallow Candal, to join the Rebel). Peppas
decision takes up half a line and has no justification or explanation.4 On
the first page we see the full extent of the menace Gramigna wagers over
the country. Without the slightest transition, we move on to the portrait
of Tallow Candle and his extreme riches, and to the announcement of the
marriage. By the end of the same paragraph Peppa announces her refusal
of Tallow Candle and her desire for no one else but Gramigna. There is
not a single reflection on the part of the characters or of the narrator that
explains the necessity or reasons for such a relinquishment.
This rapid transition is somehow not jarring for the reader because
the men are presented as two elements of an opposition, each equally
prodigious: they are equivalent. This connection has only to be suggested
for it to seem justified and natural, because it is already understood that
they are two faces of the same phenomenon. Peppas sudden change is
justified because she has passed from the height of riches to the depths of
3
Saposnik (1974) says the same thing about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Struck by the
number of interpretations of Hydes character, he remarks that nevertheless they are
all metaphorical: Hyde is usually described in metaphors because essentially that is
what he is: a metaphor of uncontrolled appetites, an amoral abstraction. [] Purposely
left vague, he is best described as Jekyll-deformed, dwarfish, stumping, ape-like a
frightening parody of a man unable to exist on the surface (p. 101).
4
[...] it seemed [to Tallow Candle] he couldnt wait to take his bride home on the back of
his bay mule. But one fine day Peppa told him: Never mind your mule, because I dont
want to get married. Imagine the commotion! The old woman tore her hair, and Tallow
Candle remained openmouthed. Giovanni Verga, The She-Wolf and Other Stories, trans.
by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 90. For the
original Italian, see Giovanni Verga, Tutte le Novelle, ed. by Carla Ricciardi, 2 vols (Milan:
Mondadori, 1983), I, pp. 191-99.
poverty, from one pole to the other of the narration. The counterproof is
enough to convince us: what text could possibly portray an ordinary young
woman who gives up an ordinary engagement for an even more ordinary
one, without producing a battery of arguments to justify such a refusal?
In other words, the structure is one of the means of making possible the
brevity of the text.
I will not spend time proving that there are many antitheses in short
stories, which would be as easy as it is unnecessary;5 instead I will try to
isolate the effects produced by the oxymoronic tension, like detecting the
presence of electricity. Perhaps the most important point is that, in most
cases, there is no narrative reversal. Ludwig Tieck developed the argument
that the short storys specificity depended on a Wendepunkt: the narrative
line revolves as on a pivot.6 This theory was greatly discussed and soon
challenged commentators argued that there are many short stories that
contain no reversal, and others which provide several of them.7 At the same
5
Many short stories include this antithesis in their title: Miguel de Cervantes The
Illustrious Kitchenmaid and The English Spanish Lady; Franois Le Mtel de Boisroberts
Happy Despair; Alexander Pushkins The Noble Peasant; Fyodor Dostoevskys An Honest
Robber and A Little Hero; Vergas The Epic of Two Pennies and Donna Santas Sin; and
Chekhovs Big Volodya and Little Volodya and The Fat and the Thin, to name but some
examples.
6
For Tieck, the Novelle is defined by its Wendepunkt (wird sie immer jenen sonderbaren
auffallenden Wendepunkt haben). Ludwig Tieck, Ludwig Tiecks Schriften (Berlin: G. Reimer,
1828-55), XI, pp. lxxxv-lxxxvi. For a discussion of this and other German classic theories of
the short story, see John M. Ellis, Narration in the German Novelle: Theory and Interpretation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), Donald LoCicero, Novellentheorie: The
Practicality of the Theoretical (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), and more recently Garrido
Miambres, Die Novelle im Spiegel der Gattungstheorie (Wrzburg: Knigshausen &
Neumann: 2008).
7
Charles E. May discussed Tiecks theory in The Unique Effect of the Short Story: A
Reconsideration and an Example, Studies in Short Fiction, 13 (1976), 289-97. Valerie Shaw
sees it as one of the possible, simple structures: This is why stories like this one conform
to an extremely simple narrative structure which divides into two discrete and unequal
parts: an horrific situation is evoked and exploited for utmost effect, then totally reversed,
often in a brief sentence or two. Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction
(London: Longman, 1983), p. 50. See also Richard Fusco, who sees fifteen differing
plot structures and variations in [...] nineteenth century stories, in Maupassant and the
American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 4-7. Fusco develops at length the idea
of the contrast story, in which he sees an influence of Maupassant on James (pp. 188204). Six of the seven of the structures developed in Fuscos book are clearly based on
antitheses (Linear story, Ironic coda, Surprise-inversion, Loop, Contrast, and
finally Descending helical, which concerns fantastic stories and stories of madness,
where antithesis between the two worlds is central).
time, however, many critics still stress the recurrence of narrative contrasts
and reversals in short stories.8
All of them are right. But Tiecks argument must be made at a different
level: to speak of narrative reversal puts the analysis on the level of the
textual surface, whereas in reality it is almost unthinkable that a genre
of such vitality could be linked for long to a single trick of composition.9
If we look at the profound organising principles rather than superficial
forms, we will rediscover what the critics knew intuitively: the short story
does proceed by contrast. But this antithesis which is the in-depth
organising principle of the classic short story does not always operate
using the same elements.
Sometimes, this structure will indeed take the form of a reversal, as in
the case of Gramignas Mistress. Another example of a narrative reversal is
Akutagawa Rynosukes famous Mikan (The Tangerines).10 In this story, the
narrator finds himself on a suburban train in a very depressed mood. He
sees a deeply repulsive peasant girl boarding the train; her looks disgust
him; her clumsy efforts to open the window annoy him and reinforce his
feeling of discomfort in the face of the absurdity, the vulgarity, and the
monotony of the human condition, of which the time and the place are for
him the very symbol.11 Suddenly the girl succeeds in opening the window
8
While symmetrical design of some sort will frequently be present in a short story, it
is patently not a property that belongs to that form in any distinctive indispensable
way [] in many good stories symmetry is not present at all. Ian Reid, The Short Story
(London: Methuen, 1977), p. 59. See also Per Winther who, following the work of John
Gerlach, recognises the existence of the perception of an antithetical pattern as being
at the source of the sense of closure that accompanies the sense of natural termination.
Per Winther, Closure and Preclosure as Narrative Grid in Short Story Analysis, in The
Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. by Per Winther, Jakob
Lothe, and Hans H. Skei (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), pp.
57-69 (p. 60).
9
This is so true that it was the substance of much criticism at the end of the twentieth
century, and led to this idea being considered useless to define the genre (writers would
hasten to contradict the critics by composing short stories that did not correspond to the
specified criteria); hence the essential modesty of contemporary criticism, especially
among the French and Anglophones. See for example T. O. Beachcroft, The Modest Art: A
Survey of the Short Story in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
10 Akutagawa Rynosuke, Japanese Short Stories by Rynosuke Akutagawa, ed. by Kojima
Takashi (New York: Liveright, 1961), pp. 206-11 (henceforth Kojima). The Japanese text
of this story can be found in Akutagawa Rynosuke, Akutagawa Rynosuke zensh, 19
vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1954-1955), IV, pp. 95-99 (hereafter Iwanami). Hereafter,
the references are given first to the translation, then to the original text.
11 Ibid, p. 207 (p. 96). The term shch (symbol) is Akutagawas (Iwanami, p. 96); it
indicates that we are reaching the limit, the hardening of the paroxystically described
narrative elements into abstract entities.
when they are in the middle of a tunnel, and the narrator chokes on the soot
that pours in. Just as he is about to scold her, she throws some tangerines,
which she had hidden in her blouse, to her young brothers who have come
to see her off.
This is the Wendepunkt of the short story, which brings about the
complete reversal: from that moment, the narrator understands the girls
behaviour, and is saddened by her lot. All the symbols scattered through
the text are reversed: the warm sunny color of the tangerines is contrasted
with the gloominess, paroxystically described at the beginning. The end
of the story presents the same terms as at the beginning, but inverts the
signs: I was able to forget some of my boredom and my indescribable
exhaustion, and also the absurdity, the vulgarity, and the monotony of the
human condition.12 The antithesis here operates on the unfolding of the
narrative, in accordance with Tiecks definition.
However, usually antithetic tension is established between textual
elements that have nothing to do with the unfolding of the narrative.
Neither Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde nor The Gift of the Magi offer a narrative
reversal. Similarly, in a story like Henry Jamess The Beast in the Jungle,
it is the central concept, the event which is reversed in the antithesis.13
Because John Marcher, the hero, has spent his whole life waiting for the
extraordinary event for which he thinks he was born, nothing happens. A
woman, May Bartram, spends years beside him as he keeps his eyes riveted
on the beast of destiny that never appears. All she will have been in her
life is the companion of that waiting. After her death, he suddenly realises
that the destiny for which he has waited so long may have been to love her;
blinded by his expectation of an exceptional happening, he failed where an
ordinary man would have succeeded. A statement at the end of the short
story is typical of the genre: [] he had been the man of this time, the man,
to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke
that was his visitation.14 Ultimately, Marchers life had been exceptional
in a negative sense. The antithesis is essential but it does not affect the
12 Kojima, p. 211 (p. 99).

13 Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (New York:
Rupert Hart Davis, 1960), XI, pp. 351-402 (hereafter Edel). On this story, see also Arthur
A. Brown, Death and the Reader: Jamess The Beast in The Jungle, in Postmodern
Approaches to the Short Story, ed. by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Joseph Longo
and Mary Rohrberger (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2003), pp. 39-50.
14 Edel, p. 401 (the emphasis is Jamess).
unfolding of the narrative nor does it play any part in the chain of actions:
it simply places two opposite possibilities side by side.
The antithesis can also be the abstract law of a paradigm. A good
example of this can be found in another important story of Akutagawas,
Kareno sh (Withered Fields), which again demonstrates the primacy of the
structure over character in the short story.15 In the story, Bash the
great seventeenth-century poet is dying. He is surrounded by his
faithful disciples, all of whom are well-known figures in Japan that are
considered to be great men in their own right. The narrative is quite simple:
Akutagawa evokes the setting and the gloomy day, and then he describes
each disciple, one after the other, as he goes to pay his last respects to
his dying master. It is a story that most Japanese readers would know
well. Akutagawa, however, describes something nobody in the Japanese
tradition ever imagined when telling the story before. Traditionally the
story was used to illustrate the dedication and love of the disciples for their
master. However, in Akutagawas version, the disciples react completely
unexpectedly: negatively, selfishly. Each is discovering himself engrossed
in his own preoccupations far from the solemn grief everyone thought he
was experiencing.
What is interesting in Withered Fields is that it is the type of text that is
considered complex. Critics (both Japanese and western) often cite it as
bearing the echo of the contradictory sentiments that disturbed Akutagawa
about the death of his own master, Natsume Sseki. The unexpected scene
is supposed to be a revelation for each of them, and for the readers as
well. But close analysis shows things to be quite different, and particularly
interesting because the matter is treated in a way that is typical of the
classic short story.16
15 Akutagawa Rynosuke, Exotic Japanese Stories: The Beautiful and the Grotesque, trans. by
Takashi Kojima and John McVittie (Liveright: New York, 1964), pp. 291-303 (hereafter
Kojima). The Japanese text can be found in Iwanami, II, pp. 201-11.
16 Edwige de Chavannes-Fujimoto is a good example. Her claim that Withered Fields is
a profound psychological study does not prevent her from recognising that there is a
sort of mechanical law in this text, through which assumed attitudes are automatically
transformed into their contrary. She notes that the beginning of the story lacks
psychological complexity and that all the descriptive traits (the costume or bearing of
the characters) are caricatures, the equivalent of the attributes given to puppets. As the
text unfolds, she argues that Bashs death reveals each disciples true depth. According
to Chavannes-Fujimoto, the story provides a true study of the human heart, because
Akutagawa was distributing the different emotions of his heart among the various
characters. Edwige de Chavannes-Fujimoto, Akutagawa Rynosuke. Lorganisation de la
phrase et du rcit (Paris: Inalco, 1979), pp. 145-46.
The essential point is that the various revelations which occur to

the characters are in fact homologous. Certainly, we see the deep interior
reactions of each of them to the death of their venerated master. But
these reactions always follow an identical law: in each case they radically
contradict what was anticipated. The disciples mourning of their masters
death is proverbial: we expect an account of terrible grief. But each of them
acknowledges with surprise its absence. There is certainly revelation, but
this comes in the fact that every detail of their grief is the exact opposite of
what they had expected. Kikaku experiences total indifference, augmented
by physical disgust for the appearance of the dying man; Kyorai recognises
that his constant activity on behalf of his masters well-being has mostly
resulted in his own immense self-satisfaction; Shik is only concerned
about the funeral peroration which he must compose, and the material fallout from his masters death; Inenbo only sees in anothers death the respite
which he will experience from his own inevitable demise; and finally Js,
that old and faithful Zen devotee is filled with a profound serenity
the unlimited sadness and unlimited comfort of being freed from the
chain with which his spirit had been weighed down by Bashs crushing
personality.17
By taking their various attitudes to be the manifold reactions of one
man (Akutagawa) on the death of his own master, critics have reverted
to the idea of diversity, and therefore of a certain psychological richness.
But if we forget about the author (and this text in no way claims to be
autobiographical) we immediately become aware of the narrative
saturation. Drawn together within the circle of disciples, these unexpected,
diverse feelings basically make us feel that we are faced with all possible
egotistical reactions. What the text provides, then, is not a series of
differentiated nuanced portraits but in turn two successive concepts: first,
what the critic Edwige de Chavannes-Fujimoto calls the puppet, in
which the initial characterization is a caricature, a symbol of a conventional
attitude; then, through the intermediary of a reversal that is identical in
each case, the opposite attitude, which is equally a caricature. The text does
not follow the meanderings of a soul, but creates two paradigms linked
one to the other through antithesis.18 One cannot transform mechanical
17 Kojima, p. 302 (p. 210).

18 Chavannes-Fujimoto (1979), moreover, insists on the importance of the contrasts in this
text: she recognises a series of reversals, and antitheses, and concludes: a simple
click is enough to make the other face appear (p. 146).
symmetry into complexity by simply noting as Akutagawa does when

speaking of Kyorai that satisfaction and remorse, like the shade and
sunlight, bore with them a destiny that had entangled him.19
Even Js, who benefits from somewhat special treatment, is
nevertheless reduced to a caricature. He is the only disciple whose feelings
reveal a certain ambivalence: a sad and voluptuous joy. Pains are taken to
characterise him as the most faithful of the disciples, excessively devoted.
Yet, this embryo of ambiguity cannot hide the tension between devotion
and real relief at the death of another, with that other being dearest to his
heart. What we have is a pure and total reversal of the traditional version
of the death of Bash. The contrast as a quasi-abstract law of the text is
underlined by the reminder sub fine of this traditional version:
In such a way it happened that Bash-an Matsu Tosei, the greatest haiku
master, unprecedented in ancient and modern times, enveloped in the
boundless grief of followers who mourned his passing, suddenly began his
journey towards death.20
Akutagawa returns ironically to the vulgate: the boundless grief is exactly

what has been deconstructed by irony.
Secondary tensions
Antithesis is not a stylistic device but an organising principle in the classic
short story. And so it is not surprising to find it at all levels of the text,
where it creates microstructures and establishes secondary oppositions
that contribute to the coherence and stability of the text as a whole. Anton
19 Kojima, p. 296 (p. 205).
20 Ibid, pp. 302-03 (p. 211). Critics frequently insist on the presence of contrasts in the short
story, but never, to my knowledge, see it as a profound part of the structure. In addition
to the work of Tieck, the contemporary writer e Kenzabur argues that the density of
writing found in good short stories is the result of tension. However, to his mind, this
tension might be found not in the text, but within the author. He gives as examples the
writers of Meiji and himself. He cites the tension between his persona as a nave young
man of provincial Shikoku and his reality as the celebrated darling of Tkys literary
elite. As for the Meiji writers, they were torn between western and Japanese culture, and
this provided the basic oxymoronic tension in most of their short stories Mori gais
Maihime (The Dancing Girl) or Fushinch (Under Construction), for example. One should
remark that this does not allow for gais Sansh Day (Sansh the Steward), or Kda
Rhans Goj no t (The Pagoda) yet these texts are nevertheless organised by a very
strong oxymoronic tension. e goes on to criticise the younger generation, who refuse
to subject themselves to this kind of tension and adapt completely to the American
subculture: which is why, according to e, there are no great short stories being written
today. e Kenzabur, Sakka no soba kara, Bungakkai, 41-49 (September 1987), 180-83.
Chekhovs Volodya Bolshoi i Volodya Malenkii (Big Volodya and Little Volodya)
provides a good example of what I call secondary tensions.21 A young
woman, Sophia, has just married a colonel much older than herself (Big
Volodya) because the man she loves (Little Volodya) does not return her
affections. The essential antithetic tension in this story is the clash between
Sophias demonstrative gaiety at the beginning (her discovery that she
really loves her husband and her happiness in being married) and her
despair at the end, when her life seems completely ruined. This is a common
theme for Chekhov: the impossibility of leading a pure and joyous life.
Along with this basic tension, a series of others are established: the most
important is the opposition between Sophias exaggerated expressions
of deep feelings and the void into which they fall; her husband attaches
absolutely no importance to her desire for spiritual purification. She then
turns to Little Volodya, who becomes her lover immediately after her
marriage, and asks him for guidance just one word that will help her
find a way out of the dreary misery of her life. All he does is to repeat like a
refrain, throughout the text, the onomatopoeic tararaboumbia.22 Similarly
it is enough for Chekhov to compare the relationship that binds the two
Volodyas with that which bound the great poets Gavrila Derzhavin and
Alexander Pushkin in order to illuminate the antinomy between the two
worlds in which these relationships exist.23
Finally, in keeping with these three oppositions, another contrast plays
an important role in our perception of the principal theme: the opposition
between Sophias life of pleasure, and that of her friend Olga, who has just
entered a convent as a novice. The contrivance here is obvious: bringing
an adulteress and a nun together creates a strong oxymoronic tension, and
allows Chekhov to treat the theme very economically. At the end of the story,
Sophia visits Olga in the convent almost every day, and her complaints to
her pious friend about her all too worldly sufferings totally discredit her
21 Anton Chekhov, Late-Blooming Flowers and Other Stories, trans. by I. C. Chertok and Jean
Gardner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 127-46 (hereafter Chertok). The Russian
text of this story can be found in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i
pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-1983), VIII, pp. 214-25 (hereafter Nauka).
22 The beginning of a burlesque song of the time.
23 [Big Volodya] extolled [Little Volodya], blessing his future just as Derzhavin did for
Pushkin. Chertok, pp. 130-31 (Nauka, p. 216). This line comes immediately after a
remark that Little Volodya has always had women in his student room. The very lively
tradition of the heroic-comic in the preceding century in Russia made readers even more
aware of this genre of proceedings: Russian readers are trained by this tradition to detect
irony.
character. The global tension gives the story structure while the secondary
tensions energise the details: by contrasting Sophias life with that of Olgas,
Chekhov intensifies its emptiness. The recurring use of contrast creates
the concrete impression of an abyss, a dead-end situation. Not only does
Chekhov show a world closed in on itself, dreary and desperate, but, by
presenting its absolute contrast, he locks in this world, while making it
immediately tangible to the reader.24
Vladimir Kataev has shown that the matrix of all Chekhovs work is
a series of short stories from his youth that he calls the short stories of
discovery.25 In these stories, the hero receives at full force the shock of an
apparently ordinary event that transforms his entire concept of the world.
An evening spent with friends in a street of brothels, an insult inflicted by
some merchants on a student whom they paid to play the piano at their
wedding, a tooth extraction;26 these are the trifling occurrences, but
for the hero they provide the occasion for reshaping his whole frame of
thought, which he had thought to be stable and definitive.27 In a great many
of these stories, the basic antithesis is emphasised by the contrast of two
expressions: kazalos/okazalos (it seemed that/it appeared clearly that).
Chekhov always constructs a diptych. He develops first the characters
false concept of the world (kazalos), before showing how he becomes aware
of its artifice. Only then will he develop the new order of the world as the
hero now conceives it (okazalos): confused, complex and in conflict. The
oxymoronic tension is thus established and proclaimed, because Chekhov
is well aware of the formidable efficacy it gives to his denunciation. We
shall see that Chekhov is one of the very few authors of the period who did
write stories free from oxymoronic tension, but these texts only constitute
24 Goethes Novelle is profoundly structured by the antithesis strength/gentleness,

summarised in the final image: If it is at all possible to think that, on the features of
such a fierce creature, the forest king, the despot of the animal realm, an expression of
friendliness, of grateful satisfaction, could be discerned, then here it was so. Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Great Writings of Goethe, ed. by S. Spender, trans. by Christopher
Middleton (New York: New American Library, 1958), p. 260. As is often the case, we
have here an entire series of secondary tensions: for example, between the princesss
vow, out of curiosity, to see the animals on her return, and her anguish at the encounter.
25 V. B. Kataev, Proza Chekhova: problemy interpretatsii (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo
universiteta, 1979). For a partial translation see Vladimir Kataev, If Only We Could Know:
An Interpretation of Chekhov, trans. by Harvey Pitcher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp.
11-19.
26 In Pripadok/The Crisis (Nauka, VII, pp. 199-221); Taper/The Pianist (Nauka, IV, pp. 204-08);
and Znakomyi muzhchina/An Aquaintance of Hers (Nauka, V, pp. 116-19).
27 Kataev (2002), p. 12.
a handful.28 Although he is rightly celebrated for the nuances in his plays,

when turning to the short story, Chekhov like Henry James uses
the capacity of the form to the full. He builds oxymoronic tensions out of
paroxystic characters, because this is a particularly efficient way to build a
story and to create emotion.
Editing antithetic tension: Maupassant and James

By way of conclusion to this chapter, I will examine two examples where
writers have reworked material organised by antithetic tension. The first
is that of Guy de Maupassant, who reused in the story La Confession (The
Confession) the material he had previously included in the chronicle Un
drame vrai (A True Story).29 In A True Story, the earlier of the two texts,
Maupassant declared that the facts he was about to relate were impossible
to use in a story, because they were too unlikely, even though they were in
fact true. He developed a discussion with the critic Albert Wolff in which
he maintained that this material would be fit only for popular novelists.30
In the latter story, Maupassant removed what he thought to be the most
far-fetched details of the story, but he left the deeply improbable antithesis
that lay at its core.
In A True Story, the following are the true but unlikely facts: a man
has killed his brother on the eve of the latters marriage to a young woman
whom they both love. The crime is not discovered, and he marries the girl.
They have three daughters, one of whom marries the son of the magistrate
who had been in charge of the murder investigation. During the wedding
feast, the new father-in-law sings a song that the judge recognises, but
without remembering the details. Lengthy research enables him to find the
song in the midst of the papers on this very old case: it was copied on the
torn page that had served to load the gun. He finds the book buried among
the father-in-laws possessions, and has him condemned.
28 The few examples of Chekhovs stories that are free from oxymoronic tension tend to
come later in his career, for example The Bishop (1902) and The Betrothed (1903). Anton
Pavlovich Chekhov, Anton Chekhovs Short Stories, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York:
Norton, 1979), pp. 235-63.
(Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 371-74 (The Confession) and pp. 491-94 (A
True Story). For the original French (henceforth cited as Pliade), see Guy de Maupassant,
Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade,
1974), I, pp. 1035-39 (La Confession) and I, pp. 495-97 (Un Drame vrai).
30 There is a summary of this discussion in Pliade, I, p. 1448.
The Confession is based on a similar idea of an unsolved murder finally

being resolved. It tells the story of two sisters: the youngest, Marguerite,
devotes her life to her elder sister Suzanne after Suzannes fianc
disappeared on the eve of her wedding. Marguerite was obstinate in her
refusal to marry, and on her death-bed she reveals the reason: she had
killed the fianc forty years earlier out of jealousy. In this story, Maupassant
removed all the fantastic vicissitudes of A True Story and substituted the
younger sisters remorse for the judges random finding. She had spent
her entire life expiating her crime, and she herself confesses it; there are no
clues miraculously discovered in unusual circumstances. The closeness of
the two sisters increases the pathos of the situation, and an entire life spent
in guilt and atonement collides with the intensity of the jealousy and horror
of a confession. The behavioural patterns are what interest Maupassant in
the latter story rather than police intrigue.
However, the author retained the first storys eminently rhetorical
structure in its entirety. Although his intention was not to write a popular
novel, he made the details incandescent and let them clash violently with
each other within the framework of the short story. He substituted one
antithetic tension for another, but without renouncing it, because it is the
antithesis that gives the text its compactness and effectiveness. The crime
is just as outrageous (to kill a sisters fianc out of jealousy is on the same
scale as killing a brother in order to steal his fiance).31 In short, Maupassant
did not consider the somewhat forced structure to be contrived; he thought
the problem lay in the far-fetched details. For a realist short story writer,
improbability depends on the circumstances and not on the organization of
the material, no matter how rhetorical. This seems particularly surprising
given the theory that, as we saw in the last chapter, short stories must be
written simply about simple things.32
31 Maupassant writes a long passage in which Suzanne, before she grants her sister
forgiveness, plunges into a vivid paroxystic vision of the life she would have led
with the man she loved.
32 It is in this light that I think we must consider Bakhtins analysis of the Schwellensituation,
as developed in Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl
Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The classic short story
always creates an antithetic tension, which uncouples the elements at their most extreme,
contrasts and distinguishes them. The threshold-situation will then naturally be
found there, as it is supremely that of distinctions and reversals, whether narrative or
thematic, psychological or symbolic. Because the threshold-situation implies a certain
type of mental attitude found in the short story, it often happens that the two are
associated.
The second example is of a different order: it is a question of the

transformation from a short story into a novel. The initial sketch or germ
of Jamess The Ambassadors, defined in The Notebooks as a short story, was
reworked from that shorter version into the novel we know.33 In this
process, an essential element of the concept disappeared.34 In both the short
story and the novel, we see a New England intellectual, Lewis Lambert
Strether, delegated by his rich patroness to go to Paris to see her son, Chad
Newsome. Mrs Newsome fears that Chad is leading a life of depravity in
the French capital, and there are rumours in his hometown of Woollett,
Massachusetts that he is living with a horrible woman.35 Strether is sent
to investigate and deal with the problem.
The story is built around a central scene in which Strether urges one of
the young people he befriends in Paris, to live, and not to waste his life.36
When he conceived of the work as a short story, it was crucial for James
to diametrically oppose this attitude with another. It was necessary that
Strether should have behaved at a different moment in exactly the opposite
way: I am supposing him [] to have illustrated, as I say, in the past, by
his issue from some other situation, the opposite conditions.37 The first
element of the little drama that James imagined for his short story was that
[Strether] has sacrificed some one, some friend, some son, some younger
brother, to his failure to feel, to understand, all that his new experience
causes to come home to him in a wave of reaction, of cumpunction.38 At
the end of the story, Strether was to sacrifice himself to have Chad live.39
However James completely abandoned this crucial element of the
short story when he reworked it as a novel.40 The upheaval experienced by
Strether in the short story was sudden;41 as James puts it he was to accept
33 This is from Jamess notebook entry of 31 October 1895. Henry James, The Notebooks
of Henry James, ed. by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947), pp. 225-29 (hereafter Notebooks).
34 We have three stages of the text: the germ in the form of a short story (Notebooks, pp.
225-29); the project sent to the editor of the review for approval already in the form of
a novel (pp. 370-415); and the final stage of the novel.
35 Ibid, p. 388.
36 This conversation is an indirect response to the situation Strether finds in Paris, and an
indication of the way he will behave with Chad himself.
37 Notebooks, p. 256 (Jamess emphasis).
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid, p. 228. By not bringing him back, Strether puts an end to his own engagement to be
married to Chads mother, a marriage that represents for him rest and security.
40 As stressed by the editors (ibid, p. 371).
41 Ibid, p. 227.
on the spot, with a volte-face, a wholly different inspiration.42 In the novel,

instead of being the result of an incident, the change in Strether comes
about slowly, and his loyalty to Mrs Newsome and New England values
are never lost. At the end of the novel, although Strethers interior world is
by now completely separated from that of his rich patroness, he returns to
America without marrying his European love interest, filled with a mixture
of emotions. Once James conceives of the work as a novel, the subject is
no longer the revolution that takes place in the poor man,43 but a slow
transformation, the creation of complexity, of shades and half-truths (such
as the virtue of Chads attachment to Mme de Vionnet). In other words,
the novel has expelled the antithetic structure in which Strether would have
been seen to sacrifice someone close to him, and, for this reason, to sacrifice
himself to save someone else. The oxymoronic tension is necessary for the
short story but not for the novel.44
42 Ibid, p. 257.
43 Ibid, p. 227. The word revolution is used three times (twice on p. 227 and once on p.
228).
44 We observe the same kind of elaboration and renunciation of antithetic tension in the
work which led Verga from his Padron Ntoni, bozzetto marinaresco (A Sketch of Sailors)
to the novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree). Verga wrote to his fellow writer,
Luigi Capuana (14 March 1874), that in the short story he wanted to establish a striking
contrast between the serenity and freshness of his country hero and the life of the city.
The novel, however, abandons this tension as well as the entire mythical and mythmaking vision that Vergas other short stories of the same theme carried, for example,
Fantasticheria (Caprice). See Guido Baldi, Lartificio della regressione: tecnica narrativa e
ideologia nel Verga verista (Naples: Liguori, 1980).
3. Ending with a Twist
A whole body of contemporary criticism is dedicated to the analysis and

appraisal of short stories endings. A storys conclusion has often been
thought of as an effective way of grasping the genres characteristic features,
as well as to understand the ways that readers experience the genre.1
Influenced by the seminal reflexions of Frank Kermode in The Sense of an
Ending,2 critics like John Gerlach, Per Winther, David Sheridan and Susan
Lohafer have all argued that endings were of key importance in defining
the short story.3 This idea has been present since the very beginnings of the
1
To use Rebecca Hernndezs words: the opening and closing markers are usually
identified as fundamental criteria for triggering the sense of storyness. Rebecca
Hernndez, Short Narrations in a Letter Frame: Cases of Genre Hybridity in Postcolonial
Literature in Portuguese, in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed.
by Viorica Patea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 155-72 (p. 167). See also Susan Lohafer
in Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Lohafer notes that there is a
[move] from the analysis of closural features and effects, to a test of the primacy, the
necessity, the uniqueness of the short story in the family of genres (p. 55).
2
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000 [1st ed. 1967]).
3
John C. Gerlach, Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985); Per Winther, Closure and
Preclosure as Narrative Grid in Short Story Analysis, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions
in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe and Hans H. Skei
(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 57-69; David Sheridan,
The End of the World: Closure in the Fantasies of Borges, Calvino and Millhauser,
in Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story, ed. by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden,
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.3
genre. In his Philosophy of Composition (1846), an essay as famous as his

review of Nathaniel Hawthornes Twice Told Tales, Edgar Allan Poe states
that the whole short story is a kind of preparation for its ending, and insists
that the writer should construct the story with its conclusion constantly in
mind.4 In 1925, the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky also paid particular
attention to short stories endings.5
At the end of the nineteenth century, the surprise ending in particular
came to epitomise the type of pleasure readers came to expect from the genre.
In the newspapers where the bulk of the stories were published at that time,
hundreds of stories ended with a twist-in-the-tail. Lohafer has noted that
surprise endings are now in critical disrepute because they exhibit a simple
notion of plot that can easily become simplistic, formulaic, and trivial.6 And
readers and critics are prone to oppose dramatically Guy de Maupassants
classic short stories with the more modern stories of Anton Chekhov or
Katherine Mansfield, as it seems they represent all the difference between a
closed and contrived text and an open, natural one. However, Lohafer
also reminds us that one should not condemn these endings too hastily: Ian
Reid has showed that the device can be used not only as a mere gimmick
(the merely tricky ending), but also as the ending which jolts us into
perceiving something fundamental about what we have been reading.7
Joseph Longo and Mary Rohrberger (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 9-24; and
Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983) and Preclosure and Story Processing, in Short Story Theory at a
Crossroads, ed. by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Louisiana State University Press,
1990), pp. 249-75.
4
It is only with the dnouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable
air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at
all points, tend to the development of the intention. Edgar Allan Poe, Poe on Short
Fiction, in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1994), pp. 59-72 (p. 67).
5
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey
Archive Press, 1990), pp. 52-70.
6
Lohafer (1983), p. 97. Valerie Shaw, while discussing famous stories with a surprise
ending makes the comment more general: The main drawback to stories which gain
narrative compression by making plot serve a single realization, however ironic in
quality, is that like most jokes or anecdotes, they can never arouse the same bafflement
and surprise twice over. Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (London:
Longman, 1983), p. 56.
7
Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 60-62. On the surprise ending, and
its more complex variant the surprise-inversion, see Richard Fusco, Maupassant and the
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Fusco also talks about the trick ending as
a structural dogma, and about the critical disdain towards it (see his introduction,
especially p. 4).
Ending with a Twist45
Having recognised the crucial importance of paroxystic characterisation

and antithetic structure in previous chapters, we will now look at how the
short storys ending, be it improbable or natural, takes its force from the
structure at large. The ending is where the forces at play in the narrative
come to light. Final twists are one way of unleashing the full power of the
antithetical forces, but open endings can serve a similar purpose.
The twist-in-the-tail and antithetic tension

One of the most famous twist-in-the-tail endings is in Chekhovs Toska
(Misery).8 It is a story of a sleigh-driver who has lost his son, and tries to
tell everyone he meets about his grief. Each person in turn rejects him,
including a hunchback whose infirmity should have made him sensitive
to the misfortunes of others. Ignored by everyone, and left alone with
his distress, his story ends with a twist: he must confide his sorrow to
his horse, which is standing in the straw after the nights work. This
ending reveals the depth of the sleigh-drivers despair and the terrible
abyss separating him from the others. By showing an animal as the only
possible confidant for a desperate man, Chekhov emphasises the worlds
cruel inhumanity.
This of course is a case of a surprise ending adding emotion to the text,
as it brings to the surface the real significance of the foregoing action.9
The essential point, however, is that the powerful emotional effect of the
story is not created at the final moment, but was present in the text from the
beginning. It comes from the antithetic structure, which makes us aware of
the irreconcilable juxtaposition of two worlds: that of the unfortunate man
and that of those who are indifferent to his suffering. Chekhov shows all
the steps taken by the old man as a series of useless efforts each one more
desperate than the other to stress the constant lack of understanding
shown to him. The trick ending condenses that unrelenting coexistence into
the paradox of the horse alone being gifted with the virtue of humanity.
It sharpens our perception of it; it shocks us. But the entirety of the text is
8
Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhovs Short Stories, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw, trans. by
Constance Garnett (New York: Norton, l979), pp. 12-16 (hereafter Matlaw). The Russian
text of this story can be found in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i
pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1974-1983), IV, pp. 326-30 (hereafter Nauka). References
will be given first to the translation, then to the original text in brackets.
9
Reid (1977), p. 61.
there to create the conditions of that surprise. What happens with the end
is that it brings these worlds face to face in praesentia.
A most famous and often discussed surprise ending story, Maupassants
La Parure (The Necklace), is structured in the same way.10 In this story, a
young clerical workers wife, Matilda Loisel, poor and dreaming of luxury,
borrows a diamond necklace from a very rich and worldly school friend
to go to the Ministry ball to which her husband is for once invited. She
is a great success at the ball, but loses the necklace. She has it copied by a
jeweller, and she and her husband spend the next ten years working day
and night to pay it off. One day she meets her friend promenading in the
Champs-Elyses, and she explains to her why she has grown old and ugly
to the point of being unrecognizable. A sudden turn of events: the friend
informs her that the original necklace was nothing more than a cheap
imitation.
Andr Vial suggests that the trick ending balances and carries equal
weight with the rest of the text.11 This idea can be taken further: the whole
story is epitomised by the ending, which brings to the surface the tension
that organises the text. Again, it is a question of a radical opposition
between two worlds. On the one hand, the ordinary world of the working
class a theme eminently typical of Maupassant carried to its extreme
here in the powerful images of the frantic ten years work of the Loisels.
On the other hand, there is the life of elegance and luxury in the dreams of
Mme Loisel and in the actual world of her friend which is epitomised
by the necklace. The ending lays bare this system by reversing it; it gives
the reader a key to this narrative by pushing the process to its paroxysm.
By destroying the very idea of the necklaces value, Mme Loisels dream is
reduced to nothing. In a single act, ten years of intense effort the sacrifice
of an entire life is undermined from within, made even more useless and
senseless.
Franck OConnor notes how remarkable it is that the reader of short
stories never thinks about the future of the characters.12 If we were to take
10 Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine
Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 172-77 (hereafter Artinian). The
French text of this story can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed.
by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), I, 1198-1206
(hereafter Pliade).
11 Andr Vial, Guy de Maupassant et lart du roman (Paris: Nizet, 1954).
12 Frank OConnor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Cleveland, OH: World
Publishing Company, 1963).
a moment to think about the characters in The Necklace, we would see that
it would be impossible for no good to result from the efforts of the Loisels.
If they have replaced a real jewel with an imitation, they must now own a
nice little fortune, equal to the value of the jewels. But our reading never
gets that far: we are full of the sight of this misery and these broken dreams,
and are unable to escape the magnetic circle which the text draws around
us. The basic result of the trick ending is to magnify the already powerful
effect of the tension created earlier in the story. And when rereading a
story such as this one, our feeling for the drama will be intensified and the
antithetic tension will be deepened. Rereading produces the tragic irony:
the tension is increased because we know from the outset that all these
efforts, described with such force and detail, are in vain. We have in mind
the two poles and we see them clash constantly.
The Twist-in-the-tail and retroreading

Far from O. Henrys simple trick endings, great stories with a twist-in-thetail force us into some sort of a retroreading: a reconsideration of the
entire text from its beginning.13 This is the case, for example, in Poprygunya
(The Grasshopper), one of the few short stories that the mature Chekhov
ended with a twist.14 Olga Ivanovna the Grasshopper, or literally, the
praying mantis is an exalted young woman who is passionate about
art and artists. She is the wife of a doctor, Osip Stepanich Dymov, whom
she finds very dull compared to her seemingly brilliant artistic friends.
As the story progresses she becomes increasing disillusioned with these
artists. The surprise at the end is that, upon Dymovs death, Olga realises
that her husband was, in fact, a scientific genius and the only great man she
has ever known.
Behind the apparent neutrality of the narrators discourse, the reader
quickly discerns his condemnation of the heroine and her poor ability
to judge her friends. Confronted with the panegyric of men whose false
grandeur only she is taken in by, we see clearly that Dymov, in his constant
and quiet dedication to medicine, is the only character leading a useful life
(something that is always important in Chekhovs universe). The ending
vastly strengthens the previous text by concentrating its scattered elements
13 The idea of retroreading is developed by Michael Riffatterre, Semiotics of Poetry
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978).
14 Matlaw, pp. 69-90 (Nauka, VIII, pp. 7-31).
and becoming the catalyst for a more energetic process. Olgas realisation
at the moment of her husbands death comes, of course, too late.15 Here the
twist-in-the-tail is realised in the mocking commentary she hears from
the whole room: You missed your chance! You missed your chance!.16 In
other words: in your mad chasing of geniuses, you have ignored the one
truly great man. As his wife, contributing to his fame, she could have been
associated with Dymovs grandeur, and, what is more, be truly loved.
In this case the trick ending does more than simply summarise the
antithetic tension: it unveils it, making visible a whole aspect of the text
that Chekhov had taken pains to conceal from us. Of course we knew
from the beginning that Olgas high opinion of her friends was without
foundation. From the first page the accumulative repetition of the name
Olga Ivanovna unexpected in a stylist as Chekhov already rouses
our suspicion that the tremendous qualities she sees in her friends are in
direct proportion to the homage continually paid to her own talents. But
the ending reveals the other pole of the tension, the one we could not have
entirely foreseen, but which we recognise the moment it is presented: not
only has she spent her life believing mediocre people to be great, but the
irony of fate in her worldly blindness she did not see the one person who
was worth noticing, her own husband. This ending creates nothing, but it
provides the supplementary turn of the screw, and clinches the theme.
All the metaphors of confinement are appropriate here: we remain struck
by this apparition of destiny, which suddenly imprisons the heroine in an
ironic end and leaves her no escape.
On rereading, in the harsh light cast by the ending, we can identify many
elements that we underestimated the first time around, if not totally missed:
the mention of the painter Ryabovskys remarkable physical beauty, for
example or the worldly tone assumed to judge the value of the drawings of
a landowner as veritable miracles.17 It is as if the short story were being
15 If it were not too late, the forces introduced would not unleash the maximum power they
could produce. This is one of the reasons drama is so often mentioned in relation to short
stories; see Shaw (1983), pp. 63-66, for example, or the French philosopher Hippolyte
Taine on Maupassants Le Champ doliviers (The Olive Grove), which, he exclaims, is a
piece from Eschyles (quoted in Pliade, II, p. 1702). This could very well be an accurate
comparison on the level of structure where there is a twist-in-the-tail: catastrophe
brings short stories, like tragedies, to an end because at this point the height is reached
and to continue would only weaken or change the subject.
16 Matlaw, p. 89 (Nauka, p. 30). The original Russian is the ironic repetition of a unique
word: prozevala! prozevala! (missed! missed!).
17 Ibid, p. 70 (p. 8).
read in two different stages: before reading the ending, we were sensitive to
the discordances. Some elements perhaps made us uncomfortable, but we
were not sure why. On rereading, we discover another landscape in which
the contours are clear and defined.
At the end of a story, when a trick ending reveals the truth about the
narrative, our mind is settled. Theoretically, there are now two possibilities.
Either one meaning replaces the other and eliminates it, or the text
plays on the two scenes at the same time and the two meanings become
superimposed on one another. Classic short stories generally belong to
the former category. One meaning replaces the other: the sense of the first
reading is seen to be wrong, and must be replaced by a different truth.18
This is the case in The Necklace, and most definitely in The Grasshopper.
We certainly cannot go on thinking that the necklace is real (and that the
Loisels efforts are justified), and it is not possible to think that the great
men around Olga are, in spite of everything, truly important artists. The
Grasshopper establishes its truth very firmly, and behind the remarks of the
artists on the diverse and varied talents of Olga, we read their snobbishness
and Ryabvovskys carnal desire for the heroine.19
One specific set of stories, however, retain their ambiguity until the
end. Fantastic stories do not generally replace one truth with another,
but superimpose two interpretations without withdrawing one or the
other, as through a stereoscope. This is a feature of fantastic stories at large:
generations of readers have discussed the reality of the facts in Henry
Jamess The Turn of the Screw, for example. The whole point of the Modern
Fantastic is to put the reader in a state of uneasiness, where nothing is
ever clear or definite,20 and the surprise ending can be used to strengthen
18 This replacement is the origin of the impossibility of rereading most of the short stories
that rely on a surprise ending. The beginning of the text falls flat from the moment the
surprise is revealed and the mystery clarified. In the cases where there is no possible
retroreading, the beginning, which was meant to lead us into error, no longer misleads
us, and the text loses all its charm.
19 May describes such a retroreading of James Joyces The Dead. See Charles E. May, The
Secret Life in the Modern Short Story, in Contemporary Debates on the Short Story, ed. by
Jos R. Ibez, Jos Francisco Fernndez and Carmen M. Bretones (Bern: Lang, 2007), pp.
207-25 (pp. 216-18). See also Fuscos (1994) analyses of some surprise endings (pp. 22-26
and 107): these three revelations sharply requalify our comprehension of the story and,
hence, of war but also of codas (p. 18).
20 See Tzvetan Todorovs definition of the Fantastic as implying the readers (and often the
characters) hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events
described. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans. by Richard Howard (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press,
1973), p. 33. See also Maupassants own reflections, as developed in a famous article
that particular effect.21 A particularly remarkable example of this is found

in Maupassants Sur leau (On The River), which describes a fishermans
night of anguish when his boat is suddenly stranded in the middle of a
river and he falls prey to strange visions.22 We saw in Chapter One that
the structure of this story stems from there being two sets of paroxysms,
antithetically opposed to each other: the admiration of the beauty of nature
and the anguish which at times replaces it. The narrator claims to be mad
about water, and begins his tale with a profession of faith: Let a fisherman
pronounce the word [river]. To him it means mystery, the unknown, a land
of mirage and phantasmagoria.23 After developing the theme of the
beauty of the river, he then in turn describes its danger: it is both seductive
and treacherous. Moments of exaltation the stillness of being at anchor
after a long days fishing, the contemplation of the phantasmagorias
alternate rapidly with moments of panic, when the anchor refuses to come
up, the fog hides the boat, and the hero becomes prey to nightmares.24 With
daylight his misadventure comes to an end, and two fishermen help him
lift the anchor. He is ready to laugh (and we with him) that his evening
of terror was the result of his nerves playing an unexpected trick on him.
Yet at the precise moment when the story is complete, and we the readers
emerge with him from the nightmare, the fishermen manage to raise the
anchor; but with it they bring up the body of an old woman with a big
stone tied around her neck.25
Here the ending suddenly disturbs the balance which had only just
been established: we thought we could laugh at the adventure, we believed
it had been an hallucination caused by a mind weakened by solitude and
alcohol, and we agreed with the narrator when he considered his feelings
somewhat puerile. Then suddenly: once more I felt the same strange
published in Le Gaulois (7 October 1883), p. 1: [Since we entered Modernity], the writer
kept roaming on the borders of the realm of the supernatural rather than entering it.
He found terrifying effects while staying on the border of the possible, by throwing
the [readers] souls, aghast, into hesitation. The reader, uncertain, lost his footing
(translation ours).
21 Fusco (1994) does not consider that, in Maupassants surprise-inversion stories, one
meaning replaces the other; he insists to the contrary on the weav[ing of] competing
perspectives (p. 48). The examples he gives, however, are of fantastic tales or tales of
madness which make a very particular use of the form and, as we will see in this
books epilogue, finally led to its deconstruction.
22 Artinian, pp. 169-72 (Pliade, I, pp. 54-59).
23 Ibid, p. 169 (p. 54).
24 Ibid, pp. 171-72 (pp. 58-59).
25 Ibid, p. 172 (p. 59).
nervousness creep over me. The anchor remained firm and, as the body
appears, everything is brought into question.26 It is not that we are ready,
consciously, to recognise that the presence of a body blocking the anchor
could produce supernatural effects. But at the least expected moment, the
apparition of the corpse gives meaning to a whole series of indications of
something bizarre that we had observed in passing without being able to
give them any precise form or value.
The narrator, trying desperately to reason with himself, had refused
to make the necessary connection between the various bizarre elements. It
is the ending that identifies this connection, even though it is only through,
and for, our unconscious perception. The rapidity with which it comes
upon us is the best guarantee of our accepting this connection, even if only
to refute it immediately. It forces us to review all the elements accumulated
in our memory and to see how well they are organised. We can therefore
no longer ignore either one or the other interpretation; they are no longer
exclusive, and we are left with the absolute ambiguity, the very basis of
the Modern Fantastic. What has taken place? The only conclusion would
seem to be the one given by the narrator at the beginning: a singular
adventure, which leaves one perplexed.
A traditional comparison associates the short story with the sonnet,
because of the intensity of its impressions: in the short story, as in the
sonnet, we have in our head all the significant traits which work together to
obtain a universal effect. This concept seems to me to be quite accurate from
a technical point of view, and I hope to have shown why: in a genre that
is so dependent upon antithetic tensions, where the structure is essential,
and rests so heavily on the paralleling of elements, the reader is completely
accustomed to a work of structural order. We have just seen that if the signs
accumulated in the course of the text do not take on meaning immediately,
they are organised into a sort of secondary account, half-hidden but
perceptible. The elements are, as it were, put on reserve in the memory,
and the ending gives them a definitive place in the structure. Whether one
rereads it or not, the fullness of meaning of the structure and of course
its brevity means that it amounts to the same thing. At the end of the text,
ones mind runs through the elements stored during the reading and gives
them back their hidden meaning, the meaning provided by the general
structure and economy of the work.
26 Ibid, p. 170 (p. 57).
Open texts and tension

One consequence of the structure of the classic short story is that there is no
radical difference between open texts and those locked in by the trick
ending; the absence of a twist does not mean that there is no tension, but
simply that the tension has not been unleashed. Sometimes the impact is
even more powerful if the tension does not materialise in such an ending.
Chekhovs Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with Lapdog) can be considered the epitome
of the open text, with its last word: beginning.27 This is a particularly
important and complex story, with very subtle effects and one of the
very few where the distancing of the characters will be finally supervened.
However, I would like to stress here that the structure Chekhov sets up is
the same as in the classic stories we have already seen; and that even the
endings effect is very close to what can be observed in texts locked in by
the surprise ending, although this effect is reached through the opposite
process.
What is built by Lady with Lapdog is a dynamic antithesis of the same
kind we saw at work in The Grasshopper or The Necklace. At the beginning
of the story, Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov is an apathetic Moscow civil servant
and also a libertine; he is a philanderer who constantly deceives his boring
wife, only to find in his liaisons an almost greater boredom. In the end,
Gurov, in contrast to this past, lives only for his mistress Anna Sergeevna,
whom he loves with a prodigious intensity; their love is compared to the
natural attachment of two migratory birds, indestructible and with the
commitment of a married couple. Gurov is not immediately transformed
by the liaison with Anna: at first it is shown to be even more boring than his
other adulterous adventures. But from the moment that his life obeys the
mandates of his passion, this love becomes as extreme as his boredom had
been, the sole principle of his life, the law that governs all of his existence.
This is not to say that Lady with Lapdog is confined in the frame of
the classic short story. What happens in this story is that, using exactly
the usual tools, Chekhov will in fact be moving beyond the classic short
story; as Charles E. May puts it, he is here present[ing] spiritual reality in
realistic terms.28 But it is important to recognise that what we have here
27 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, trans. by David Magarshack
(London: Penguin, 1964), pp. 264-81 (hereafter Magarshack). For the Russian text, see
Nauka, X, pp. 128-43. The story ends with the line: the most complicated and difficult
part was only just beginning (p. 281 [p. 143]).
28 May (2007), p. 210.
is a transitional form. In a few of the short stories Chekhov produced at

the end of his career, such as The Bishop (1902) and The Betrothed (1903),
Chekhov renounced anecdote and freed himself from the classic form
we shall come back to this in the books conclusion. But Lady with Lapdog is
a perfectly classic story, based on the usual structure and characterisation
process. The remarkable point is that within this frame, he has been able to
confront the quintessential problem of the modern short story [] How is
it possible for a realistic narrative to convey meaning and significance, to
quote May again.29
As we are now used to recognising as typical of the classic short story,
Gurovs conversion represents the passage from one paroxystic state to
another, from the depth of boredom to the height of passion. Chekhov never
once justifies Gurovs conversion. Mutatis mutandis, and the same thing
happens here as in Gramignas Mistress (see Chapter One): the passage from
one pole to the other is sufficient in itself and does not need justification
in the eyes of the reader. At no point does Chekhov try to explain Gurovs
passion, especially not by means of Annas own qualities or the quality
of their relationship: Anna is remarkably little defined. One single trait is
added to that of the bored young woman: her complete inexperience, the
diffidence and angularity of inexperienced youth.30 Of course, one could
say that it is left to the reader to add the missing links: Gurov, perhaps,
was moved by this gaucherie; Anna was, perhaps, an exceptional young
woman. But this reading is never supported by the text. What gives the
text its structure and builds its basic strength is the tension between the
two ways of existence. The absence of a twist-in-the-tail does not make
it a different kind of text; on the contrary, it ultimately plays the same role;
it is the crowning element of the process already at work, the revelation of
the force of the antithesis. By finishing with the picture of Gurov searching
desperately for a solution to their situation, by indicating that the most
difficult part was only just beginning, Chekhov creates an uncertainty that
only deepens the effect of this conversion, albeit subtly.
One of the great characteristics of Chekhovs short stories is that they
go beyond the classic use of the form by involving its formal characteristics
in the thematic plan. The tension in this story is not established between
two narrative elements, but between truth and falsehood, between the life
29 Ibid, p. 216. May is again speaking here about Joyces The Dead. The sentence goes on: It
is the same problem that Chekhov had to deal with.
30 Magarshack, p. 268 (Nauka, p. 132).
of a libertine and a first love. Chekhov exploits the tension like a dramatic
device, in order to create emotions that owe nothing to the psychological
richness of his characters, nor to the complexity of their relationship, but
are entirely based on the collision between two worlds established at the
outset of the story. The text, however, seems to us neither abstract nor
schematic (even though it is based on effects that are both), because of
its concreteness and the strength of Chekhovs description. The radical
absence of a definitive solution, for which this text is famous, serves just as
well as a trick ending to emphasise the clash between the normal life of
the man who is blas and the extraordinary life where love is the centre
of everything. The open ending shows them both to be inescapable.
4. The Tools of Brevity
The short story is almost always praised for its economy of means. In the
classic short story, this restraint is not to be found in the narrative elements
that, to the contrary, we have seen to be built on extremes. Nevertheless
the short story clearly proceeds towards its goal with a particular speed
and effectiveness: within only a few pages, the reader is introduced to
a full universe and knows what is at stake in the narrative. The aim of
this chapter is to understand how the classic short story achieves this
acceleration of comprehension in the reader its means being drastically
different from those of the novel or what I propose to call the modern
short story. The antithetical structure, as we saw in the previous chapter,
is part of the expedition of the readers understanding. However, there
are two other particularly important techniques that we will examine in
detail in this chapter: the use of preconstructed material, and the device of
focussing exclusively on the subject.
If we are quick to grasp what is at stake in a classic short story, it is
because, first and foremost, we are already familiar with the texts
characters, situations and values. The classic short story uses what we
could call preconstructed material: something ready-to-understand in
the same sense as ready-made. The reader is introduced to a universe
whose elements he or she recognises because she has come across or
thought of them previously. These elements can be and are certainly in
the great stories organised in a new, piquant way. But the fact that they
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.4
are already in some way familiar means that the reader can process them
more quickly.
The techniques used in this process are themselves diverse. The short
story can use an historical character as the protagonist someone famous
who needs no introduction to the reader; it can re-use a character that is
familiar to the reader from another story in the same collection; it can create
an empty character to be given a personality by the reader; or it can
revert to the use of types. The only thing these techniques have in common
is the particular role they play in accelerating our involvement in the
text. This chapter will also review what we could call the tight focus on
the subject: the classic short story eliminates from consideration everything
that is exterior to the precise situation on which it is centred. It concentrates
on a partial aspect of the general tableau selected for its subject. However,
excluding anything that is not dependent on the precise narrative goal is
not a simple suspension of the context; it gives a partial and eventually
false representation of a particular detail.
Preconstructed material
As usual, we shall begin with the simplest case, and look at examples in
which the story relies on the use of famous or historical characters. Apart
from texts whose sole interest rests in presenting some aspect of a famous
persons life,1 there are many short stories where the reader applies his or
her previous knowledge of the hero or of the theme of the story: Nikolai
Leskovs Ledi Makbet mtsesnkogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District);
Leonid Andreevs Lazarus and Judas Iscariot; Mori gais Hanako, in which
the main character is Auguste Rodin; Gustave Flauberts Saint Julien
lHospitalier; and Akutagawas Karenosh (Withered Fields) which we have
already discussed in Chapter Two.
Clearly Withered Fields would lose its essential strength if the heroes
were not the well-known disciples of Bash, revered in Japan since the
seventeenth century. If that were not so, the writer would first have to
explain at length the disciples virtues as well as their masters greatness
and charisma. The fame of his characters allows Akutagawa to proceed to
1
Maupassants Auprs dun mort (Beside a Dead Man), for example, is only interested in
describing Schopenhauers wake. Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy
de Maupassant, trans. by Artine Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp.
922-25.
The Tools of Brevity57
the development of the scene. This does not mean, however, that we need
to be familiar with each characters individuality in order to appreciate the
text: all we need is to grasp the terms of the problem that will be set before
us. Western readers who are not familiar with Bash only have to read
the translators short note indicating their status as good men par excellence
to be able to enjoy the text. Merely the evocation of these well-known
disciples, or of Lady Macbeth, for example, already provides the reader
with a complete idea of what might happen in this story, and the writer can
begin in medias res.
In fact, one might say that all characters in the classic short story could
be described as in some way famous, or at least (well)-known. My point is
not that the short story only provides the reader with traditional literary
types or stock characters; on the contrary, everyone insists, and with good
reason, on the number and variety of the short storys characters. Henry
James and Anton Chekhov have both declared that if their short stories
were put end to end they would present a complete picture of the society
of their time.2 This is not inaccurate: an immense panorama of social roles,
often overlooked by literature in the past, can be found in the work of short
story writers where outlaws, pariahs and marginal people are consecrated
by literature.
My point is that all of these social (or psychological) roles are already
known to the reader in one way or the other. It could be the first time he or
she has read about them in a literary text, but he has already in some way
heard of them. He may not be able to describe their life with the zest of
the storyteller, but at least he can place them on societys chessboard; he
can recognise their social role. In short, these are objective types, types
found in everyday life, even if they are not literary types. When Ambrose
Bierce describes the frontiersmen, when Herman Melville uses seamen in
his stories, when Rudyard Kipling mentions the natives of a small town
in India, they instantly evoke in the readers mind clear notions of what
an Indian, or a struggling seaman, or a frontiersman is, even if the reader
has never met someone like this in the flesh. The story will build on these
preconceived notions, without needing to describe the character in detail
first.
2
James wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson: I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my
time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible.
Henry James, Letters: 1883-1895, ed. by Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980), III, p. 240.
It is the same with characters not quite so exotic: the ridiculous

provincial who haunts the stories of Guy de Maupassant or Chekhov was
only too well known to readers of the time, who delighted in his endless
misadventures, repeated in after-dinner jokes as well as in stories in the
newspapers. This character was also very present in the mind of the readers
of intellectual journals, who were concerned with the social misery of the
provinces. When the Naturalists describe prostitutes or outlaws, when
Giovanni Verga presents his Florentine or Milanese readers with Sicilian
fishermen and muleteers, or peasants, they are illustrating a problem that
was at the centre of attention in Europe at that time.
In short, this genre perhaps more than any other form relies on
the readers own knowledge of the world and its various actors to proceed
immediately to the story. The short story will fill one of the sections of
the chessboard, giving flesh and blood to the idea the reader already has
(which may well have been an abstract and lifeless representation). But at
the same time and this is essential the short story relies on ready
made characters. The interest in reverting to such types is obvious: the
characters emerge in the readers mind fully equipped, like Athena from
Joves head, and the reader can follow them in their adventures without
losing time in discovering each of their features in detail.
Not only does the short story resort to what is already known, but it
also may even repeat the process of prefabrication. Other characters will
be deduced from a character within the text itself. We have already seen
quite a few examples of this in Chapter One. Irving Saposnik comments
in reference to Robert Louis Stevensons Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that Hyde
is none other than a deformed Jekyll, a Jekyll in reverse; created in our
imagination by a simple reversal of the signs for each of Jekylls traits.3
Similarly, in O. Henrys The Gift of the Magi, Jim is a sort of male Della, the
masculine version of the virtue Della represents; and in Vergas Gramignas
Mistress, the rebel Gramigna is the diametric opposite of the heroic Tallow
Candle. These are not, admittedly, the most subtle of short stories, but
we have seen that even the more nuanced stories also use the technique:
the fiance of the devoted Corvick in Jamess The Figure in the Carpet is
obtained simply by splitting Corvick himself in two, and Corvick, by a
reduplication of the narrator: he is another admirer of Vereker, only more
devoted.
3
Irving Saposnik, Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 101.
Character types
Here we are touching on a central point: the nature of the enjoyment that
is particular to this genre. If the short story is so willing to reproduce its
characters from each other or to take them completely formed from society,
it is because its interest lies elsewhere. It is hardly feasible to abide by the
assertion, though commonly held, that the short story does not have the
time to build the characters and the universe it presents to us.4 Brevity
has never prevented lyric poetry from elaborating subtle psychological
elements, for example. What is more, the constraint of length is not always
rigorous; and if magazines have sometimes imposed a precise word count
on their authors, it is because the short story already existed as a genre, and
not the contrary.5
The key to this might be that the classic short story favours the effects
of structure over the examination and development of characters, over the
building of a complex universe. Critics like Boris Eikhenbaum, Tzvetan
Todorov or Romano Luperini were not mistaken when they rejected any idea
of psychological depth in the characters of short stories;6 Todorov argues
that their value is functional and Luperini that they are two-dimensional.7
4
Given as self-evident, the phrase la nouvelle na pas le temps (the short story does not have
the time) is a clich in French criticism, found everywhere in textbooks. See for example,
Jean-Pierre Blin, Enseigner la nouvelle: perspectives et limites dune didactique, in La
Nouvelle et daujourdhui, ed. by Johnnie Gratton and Jean-Philippe Imbert (Paris: ditions
LHarmattan, 1998), pp. 187-98 (p. 193). It is also used as a statement of definitive truth
in educational materials from the Ministre de lducation Nationale: Contrary to the
novel, the short story does not have the time to elaborate the thoughts and feelings of the
characters, Lire une nouvelle raliste de Maupassant, available at http://www.academieen-ligne.fr/Ressources/4/FR41/AL4FR41TEWB0112-Sequence-01.pdf, p. 14 (accessed
22/10/13, translation ours). Even Sean OFaolain states that in the short story there is no
time for explanation but for him this means that there must be an allusive power in the
short story (as we have seen above). He later remarks that style is in fact often slower in
the short story: In a short story one concentrates. Naturally the style is retarded. Later,
referring to Stephen Cranes The Monster, he says Compare this slow meticulous style
with that of a novelist. Sean OFaolain, The Short Story (Cork: Mercier, 1948), pp. 197,
254 and 255.
5
In Japan, the constraints of length have always been very loose, and for a long period
authors had no definition of the form of the short story (the term itself, taupen shsetsu,
did not exist before the end of the nineteenth century); many of the short stories of gai,
Kunikida Doppo or Akutagawa nevertheless present their characters in exactly the same
way, resorting to what the reader already knows.
6
See Boris Eikhenbaum, How Gogols Overcoat is Made, in Gogols Overcoat: An
Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. by Elizabeth Trahan (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982), pp.
21-36. The original Russian is in Literatura: teoriya, kritika, polemika (Leningrad: Priboi,
1927), pp. 149-65.
7
Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Dcamron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); and Romano
The reverse opinion is so common, however, that it must be examined. For a

great number of Anglophones and almost all French critics, the short story
accelerates the process of perception and entry into the narrative world,
but this is attributed to the genres allusive power, which would suggest
everything it does not say. In their opinion, the genres value belongs to
its characters, which offer great depth and psychological complexity. The
length of time spent in elaboration would be replaced by the intensity of
the readers work and by the genres remarkable ability to create for us an
entire character out of a few elements provided by the text. There would be
a magic belonging to the text of short stories that could stimulate something
new in the mind of the reader, and not, as I have suggested something
already known or foreseen.
Sean OFaolain is a typical proponent of this idea, and his remarks on
the allusive art of Chekhov are worth pausing to review. OFaolain states
that in Lady with Lapdog, the reader is invited to plumb her [Gurovs
wifes] character, to let [the readers] imagination expand her inward
nature from a few outward signs.8 He also praises the short storys format
as being more capable of suggestion than the novel. The examples he gives,
however, seem to me to be counter to his thesis. He illustrates his argument
with two descriptions of the spouses of the heroes from Lady with Lapdog.
First, Gurovs wife:
She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as
she said of herself intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling,
called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her
unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, and did not like to be at home.9
Then the husband of Anna Sergeevna:

He bent his head at every step and seemed to be continually bowing. This
was the husband whom, in a rush of bitter feeling, she once called a flunkey.
And there really was in his long figure, his side-whiskers, and the small bald
patch on his head, something of the flunkeys obsequiousness; his smile was
Luperini, Verga: lideologia, le strutture narrative, il caso critico (Lecce: Millela, 1982). See
also Giuseppe Lo Castro, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Saggi brevi di letteratura
antica e moderna, 5 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001), about types in Verga (p. 23 and
p. 63).
8
OFaolain (1948), p. 190.
9
Here as quoted by OFaolain, p. 189. The full text of Lady with Lapdog can be found in
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, trans. by David Magarshack
(London: Penguin, 1964), pp. 264-81 (hereafter Magarshack). For the Russian translation,
see Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983), X, pp. 128-43 (hereafter Nauka).

sugary and in his buttonhole there was some badge of distinction like the
number on a waiter.10
It seems strange that in reading this we could have the impression of

plumbing her character, letting [our] imagination expand her inward
nature from a few outward signs.11 On one hand, this is true: we do indeed
see something appear. We have a vivid picture before our eyes. The power
of the description, its effective reliance on hypotyposis, makes the portrait
successful. But what we see forming is not a personality in the sense that
the novel has taught us to apply this term, but a type, and one that is hardly
subtle at that.
There is no need to have an in-depth knowledge of Russia at the end
of the nineteenth century in order to see that, in the case of Gurovs wife,
we are dealing with a Bluestocking. Even for the reader who has not
been forewarned, these few external signs are enough to figure out
the role in the theatrical sense of the woman who forces her talent,
who clumsily imitates the exalted manners of her time. Certainly, for the
Russian reader of the period, this description will recall a particular type of
pedant, the intellectual woman of the 1860s, so often mocked in literature.
The description is indeed effective. However, I do not think that we can go
so far as to say that the resulting character is very complex.12
The second example is more instructive, because it reveals the essential
fact of the variety of these roles, which, no doubt, prevented the critics
from recognising the presence of types in short stories.13 Annas husband is
10 OFaolain (1948), p. 190.
11 Ibid.
12 Diana Festa McCormick notes that we know very little about the storys hero Georges
dEstouteville in Honor de Balzacs Matre Cornlius: What is extraordinary, however,
is that each character, despite the limited perspective in which he is presented, appears
lively and convincing; it is because Balzac gives what is essential about each being, the
most striking traits, to allow us readers to fill in the gaps left by his pen. Each character
is a sketch, an outline which should suggest the complete person. She continues: And
he is defined by his love or the passion which controls him. Georges dEstouteville is
defined by his love for Marie de Vallier. McCormick sees clearly that the characters
do not emerge from the narrow framework of their definition; yet she does not follow
her reasoning to its conclusion: we reconstruct, true, but a two dimensional character,
enclosed within a strict definition. See Diana Festa McCormick, Les Nouvelles de Balzac
(Paris: Nizet, 1973), pp. 134-35 (translation ours; emphases mine).
13 That is certainly the case for French criticism. For the Anglophone critics, however, my
feeling is that they are interested essentially in Chekhovs epiphanic stories a few
stories at the end of his career that are very near to Hawthornes or the twentieth century
(modern) short stories. Lady with Lapdog is not one of these late stories, but, as we
mentioned earlier, it is one of his most complex short stories, which goes beyond this
ready-made material. In this case, this schematic material is in fact filled up by the
also a type, because all the traits converge towards the same concept: that
of the ridiculous husband. Here he is explicitly confined to his definition:
Anna treats him like a flunkey and the narrator notes that in truth he
fits that definition well.14 What follows further illustrates the concept: the
detailed traits are equally the characteristics of the flunkey. But and this
is the most important point he does not correspond to a type that is
particularly easy to define. He is a servile professor, an important provincial
who is, in the larger scheme of things, a non-entity. This type has not been
codified in the way the bluestocking of the 1860s has.
But in fact he has the same status in the text, as we see from the
assimilation of the distinguished member of the university into just
another waiter. This brief description locks the character into his role;
it is the keystone that eternally supports the building. This light is a little
too bright, and the character is without shadow or shade. The fact that
the professor who resembles a flunkey is not a pre-existing literary type
changes nothing: he can immediately be imagined by the reader, because
he corresponds in every detail to a definition whose elements are preestablished. The literature of the nineteenth century is full of ridiculous,
pompous or pitiful provincial notables, and we recognise one of them
immediately when we see him, even if he is of a slightly different species.
Perhaps this process is best delineated by Maupassant. In Le Rosier de
Mme Husson (An Enthusiast),15 the narrator lingers over this rapidity of
perception and illuminates for us this process of evoking a character in its
entirety, which has been so often called the work of short story readers.16
reader, as a result of the richness of the story as a whole. It should not prevent us from
seeing that Chekhov uses the same devices as other story-tellers of his time, albeit in a
very personal way.
14 And there really was [] something of the flunkeys obsequiousness. OFaolain (1948),
p. 180; Nauka, X, p. 139.
original French text can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by
Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), II, 950-66 (hereafter
Pliade).
16 Critics speak constantly of the effort of a reader who participates much more intensely
in the constitution of the text of a short story than in a novel. Helmut Bonheim, however,
carried out a survey of a series of readers, and in the short story he found that they
rarely added new elements but simply followed the program established by the text.
See Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D.
S. Brewer, 1982). On the short stories of Flaubert and Joyce, see Andr Topia, Joyce et
Flaubert: les affinits slectives, in James Joyce: Scribble 2: Joyce et Flaubert (Paris, Minard,
1990), pp. 33-63. According to Topia, too, the reader sees the figures vaguely, but invents
The narrator arrives at the home of an old school friend, a provincial doctor,
whom he has not seen for twelve years. He introduces him to the reader as
he finds him on the doorstep of his house:
I never should have known him. One would say he was forty-five at least,
and, in a second [the] whole [of] provincial life appeared before me, dulling,
stupefying and aging him. In a single bound of thought, more rapid than the
gesture of extending my hand to him, I knew his whole existence, his manner
of life, his bent of mind and his theories of living. I suspected the long repasts
which had rounded his body, the little naps after dinner in the torpor of a
heavy digestion sprinkled with brandy, and the vague contemplation of the
sick, with thoughts of roast fowl waiting before the fire. His conversation on
cooking, cider, brandy and wine, upon certain dishes and well-made sauces
[were revealed to me just by looking at] the red puffiness of his cheeks, the
heaviness of his lips and the dullness of his eyes.17
I have quoted this long description because, by its very length, it calls for
several comments. First of all, it shows clearly that it is not a question of
the short story having or not having the time to make a character complex.
Long, detailed, and paroxystic, this description does not differ in length
from one found in a novel. However, what is being developed at length
here is nothing more than a series of the most worn-out topoi of provincial
life. This is what makes it different from a description in a (great) novel:
the short storys description develops the characteristics one by one until
they converge towards a single concept. A handful of signs create for
us a lively image, yes, but not the manifold facets of a human heart. The
combined traits converge to create a stock character: a character whose
concept is already in the readers mind.
The rest of the short story does not challenge this concept of the
provincial provided at the beginning: the long conversation between the
two friends centres on the theme of food, and, as expected, the provincial
will appear to be totally absorbed in material life, boasting of the set-up of
his farm and the freshness of his produce. In other words, the description
actualises the abstract idea, using it to the full, relying on the presuppositions
it is based upon. When we make quick judgements, we are judging on the
basis of well-established pre-existing values.18 What the short story evokes
nothing: his participation is not creative.

17 Artinian, p. 867 (emphasis mine).
18 See Pierre Boulez on improvisation: what can [the improvising player] do? He can only
turn to information he has been given on some earlier occasion, in fact to what he has
already played. Pierre Boulez, Orientations (London: Faber, 1986), p. 461.
in the mind of the reader are not new ideas. If the reader can put together
a total entity, that entity will bear the colours of his presuppositions on the
subject; it is similar to the way that a musician, when improvising, makes
use of known schemas.
Recurring characters and empty characters

There were two other means that were used in the nineteenth century and
developed in the twentieth century to provide the reader with readily
understandable material; they were used more in the modern as
opposed to the classic short story that we have been reviewing here. The
first of these is when the writer uses a character that he has introduced
to the reader in another story in the same collection. Rudyard Kipling
does this a couple of times in Plain Tales From the Hills. When he wants to
introduce a character of whom the reader, for once, can have no instinctive
knowledge, he proceeds in two steps. In a very descriptive story he
introduces Mrs Hauksbee or the policeman Strickland characters who
are almost impossible for his British readers to imagine.19 Then, in a later
story, he makes use of the already formed character whose bizarre traits
are now familiar to the reader.20 It is a technique whose function is akin
to the reversion to type or to the use of historical characters: our previous
knowledge hastens our comprehension.
This practice is one of the devices that gives cohesion to cycles or
sequences of interrelated short stories.21 For Forrest Ingram and Susan
19 Mrs Hauksbee appears in Three and An Extra and again in The Rescue of Pluffes,
Consequences and Kidnapped. Strickland appears in Miss Youghall Sais and other stories in
Plain Tales From the Hills.
20 The French philosopher Alain defines Balzacs short stories, for example, as the
crossroads at which the characters of the Comdie humaine meet. See Alain (EmileAuguste Chartier), Avec Balzac, in Les Arts et les Dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), p. 1018.
For someone who has not read Splendeurs et misres des courtisanes, the Baron Nucingen
in the short story La Maison Nucingen is perfectly schematic and frightening: he is the
ruthless banker. Readers of the novel will have a slightly different impression: they
will be repelled by his buying Esther, and at the same time moved by his love for her.
The substance of the character therefore comes also from an exterior knowledge that
precedes the short story.
21 On the difference between cycle and sequence, see for example James Nagel, The
Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (Baton Rouge,
MA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), p. 12. See also the notion of epi-stories, as
a form intermediate between novel and stories, proposed by Andrea OReilly Herrera,
Sandra Benitez and the Nomadic Text, in Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story, ed.
by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Joseph Longo and Mary Rohrberger (Westport,
CN: Greenwood Press, Praeger, 2003), pp. 51-62.
Garland Mann, it is precisely the presence of a recurring character that,

in most cases, gives a cycle its unity; the reappearance of a hero makes
it possible for the reader to remain on familiar territory.22 Sometimes, a
cycle of short stories will make use of this familiarity in order to rework the
types it presents, showing them in a slightly different light.23 Although this
subgenre is not our topic here, let us note that the story cycle has been one of
the subjects attracting most critical attention in the last decade or so. Critics
have convincingly argued that it was a genre in its own right, and may
very well have been the most innovative form of that period in the United
States.24 This was the genre predominantly written and read by minorities,
consequently modifying the relationship between author-reader and the
subject addressed.25 However, one should not assume that the cycles
automatically play this role. In James Joyces Dubliners, the inclusion in a
gallery of converging portraits accentuates the satirical charge of each. In
22 See Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference
Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); see also the classic Forrest L. Ingram,
Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The
Hague: Mouton, 1971). Recent criticism, however, has emphasised the role in unifying
the episodes of the setting. Nagel (2004) argues that a recurrent setting was historically
the most persistent means of unifying cycles (p. 17), and Gerald Lynch shows this
in Canadian story cycles. Gerald Lynch, The One and the Many: Canadian Short
Story Cycles, in The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, ed. by Rick Feddersen,
Susan Lohafer, Barbara Lounsberry and Mary Rohrberger (Westport, CN: Greenwood
Press, Praeger, 1998), pp. 35-46.
23 This would be particularly true when the cycle relies on a plurality of narrators rather
than one particular recurring narrator. A good example, outside our time-span, would
be Marguerite de Navarres Heptameron: between the stories themselves, the narrators/
listeners develop full-length discussions about what they just heard. This allows for a
new approach to the stories material, and for reappraisal of the characters. Nagel (2004)
describes the genre as having contrasting point of views, as in Tim OBriens The
Things They Carried and Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club (pp. 128-52 and 188-222). See also
Herrera (2003) on the prism offered by the epi-stories. On the sequence as allowing
each apocalypse to be served in its own cup; the collision by no means shatter[ing] the
vessel of the short story, even if some of the contents spill over, see Robert M. Luscher,
The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book, in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. by
Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press,
1990), pp. 148-167 (p. 167).
24 Nagel (2004) stresses the importance of the form, both in quantity and in quality: By
the turn of the century, nearly a hundred volumes of story cycles had appeared in the
United States, and the genre was not yet in its most important phase [] Scores of
narrative cycles appeared in each decade of the new century, some of them containing
individual works that are among the best ever published in English (pp. 4-5).
25 That for the last century many of the most important works of this kind were written
by authors from differing ethnic backgrounds suggests that [] the story sequence
offers not only a rich literary legacy but a vital technique for the exploration and
depiction of the complex interactions of gender, ethnicity, and individual identity.
Ibid, p. 10 (see also p. 17).
Go Down, Moses, John Carlos Rowe shows that the most profound feature
of the cycle may well be William Faulkners ultimate inability to grant his
African-American characters the independent voices he knows they must
have in a truly New South.26
Finally there is the use of what we could call an empty character, a
character that is hardly defined at all and can therefore be filled in by the
reader. At the end of the nineteenth century, this is even more rare than
the reuse of a character. In fact we only come across it in fantastic stories,
which exploit the possibilities of the genre along very different lines from
most classic short stories. Very near to the I used in lyric poetry, this
empty character is the channel through which emotions are conveyed
to the reader. Present in the narrative either as an actor or a witness, he
receives no real characterisation, he is left blank, and our attention is
never directed to him as a person: he is our link to the text, a window on
the narrative world.
In the fantastic stories of the nineteenth century, the empty character
helps us to enter the world of the bizarre, because we are invited to share
directly in his emotions as we are in lyric poetry and to share in his
discovery of strange facts and behaviours. The narrator of Maupassants
Sur leau (On The River), discussed in Chapters One and Three, is a good
example of this: his only defining trait is his extraordinary love of the
river.27 He is simply a means for conveying to us the strangeness of the
adventure, allowing us to share in the excitement and dread of that nights
phantasmagoria. He plays the same role of hastening our entry into the
narrative; his blankness allows us to take his point of view.28
Tight focus
The short story expels everything that is not its subject. At first glance, it
seems normal that a text, particularly a short one, should not attempt to talk
about everything. But the specific subject of the short story occupies all the
narrative space, making itself the sole object, and losing all its connections
26 John Carlos Rowe, The African-American Voice in Faulkners Go Down, Moses, in
Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, ed. by
J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 76-97 (p. 78).
28 When this character says I, we are led to feel his experience could be ours. This,
however, is not an automatic consequence of the use of the first person narrator, as we
shall see in Part III (see especially Chapter Eleven).
with the world. It is only because waiting is shown as John Marchers only
activity in Jamess The Beast in the Jungle, that it can be presented in such a
paroxystic fashion.29 The classic short story usually removes its characters
from their social ties and the relationships they have to the real world,
and sets them in the sole light of this particular adventure.
Let us think of the social life that a man like Marcher must have led in
Victorian England: nothing is said about it, not a single reference is made to
his social and cultural surroundings. We are told, incidentally, that both he
and his most devoted friend, May Bartram, play their social role very well,
but everything ensues as if that role does not exist. They go to the opera
together a dozen times a month, but the text gives no hint of the gossip
and social reprobation that a relationship such as theirs could not fail to
produce in Victorian society. Once May Bartram makes a brief allusion
to it (I never said, May Bartram replied, that it hadnt made me talked
about),30 but it has absolutely no impact on them: they do not change
anything in their life.
The descriptions of these conversational currents are not interesting in
themselves, and there was certainly no need for James to recreate Anna
Karenina. But we must recognise that all the terms of the problem are thus
falsified: if James had described, or made us feel, the weight of Marchers
social life, if he had restored the real tissue of a man of societys life, he
could no longer have presented the waiting for the Beast as prodigious,
as the only element of his life. Even the choice of a womans presence
as companion in this wait fits this rarefied atmosphere. Playing on the
widespread archetype of the woman who is totally devoted to the man she
loves, who weds his values and his destiny, James can extend to her the
paroxystic intensity of the waiting without having to justify it. Marchers
friendship with May Bartram is not meant to be a realistic relationship;
hers is a duplication of his waiting. Only by blotting out the wider context
can The Beast in the Jungle develop as a short story. If this tight focus is
abandoned, and the exterior world is reintroduced, we are no longer dealing
with the pure bodies the short story needs. Instead of immediately using
simple concepts such as Marcher, the man-who-waits, and May Bartram,
the companion-in-waiting, it would have been necessary to establish this
waiting as a narrative object, rather than simply presenting it. Comparisons
29 Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (New York:
Rupert Hart Davis, 1960), XI, pp. 351-402 (hereafter Edel).
30 Edel, p. 374.
and suggestions of other influences and other preoccupations would have

been necessary. The central proof, the reversal of destinys visitation of
Marcher, would not have had the same strength; in place of a perfect short
story, there would have been the outline of a novel.
We must reject the short storys tame and modest definition of itself: I
am going to show what occurs when X meets Y, when something happens
to X in certain circumstances. The idea of a brief and therefore fragmentary
text often allows for an unquestioning acceptance of this definition, the short
story as a presentation of fragments of existence in a realistic fashion. How
could we not acknowledge the right of a short text not to say everything?
And yet, to remove from the field of attention all that is not the limited
subject (the little action, or the concetto, in Jamess terms) does not, by
any means, amount to a simple suspension of it.31 The result is a contrived
presentation of this problem; it is now presented in a completely artificial
light.32
The complete picture of society that James or Chekhov suggested one
could obtain by putting all their stories end to end is a fraud. Each text is
entitled to resolve a unique problem, yes, but the point is that it does so by
dealing with only one variable. It refuses to take into consideration all the
others and inserts that one chosen variable into a very particular structure,
in which everything makes sense. To repeat Marchers words, enlightened
by the discovery of the meaning of his whole history: Everything fell
together [] the pieces fitted and fitted, but that is only because everything
that could not fit in it has been expelled beforehand.33 It would certainly be
rather absurd to accuse James of not having created any real psychological
complexity. And if I have chosen an example of his, it is because he cannot
be suspected of lacking perfect mastery of such complexities. What should
be noted, instead, is that complexity was not his intention in this case: it is
never the intention in classic short stories.
31 Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth
B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 148 and 144 (hereafter
Notebooks).
32 Valerie Shaw says something quite similar about Jamess stories: The tightness of the
frame actually helps to conceal the authors contrivance of patterns, because within the
space marked out the author can appear to investigate the material for its own sake.
Inside the frame, looseness can be simulated. Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical
Introduction (London: Longman, 1983), p. 75. She does not, however, judge it to be a
limitation of the genre: Framed in a circle, The Real Thing arranges its objects in such
a way as to offer us a complete, but not static picture (p. 74).
33 Ibid, p. 401.
Permanence of types
The short story not only starts with the ready-made, it never departs from
it: it does not reshape its material in order to disavow the presupposed
simplicity. The descriptions may be very strong and vivid, but they do not
challenge either the terms in which the problem is set nor the prejudices of
the reader. The characters remain types because they are enclosed in the
very simple terms of their original definition. Here again it is important
to be precise. The short story does not introduce variations but it may
well turn the terms of the problem upside down and reverse the sign that
precedes them: present as positive what we perceived to be negative, and
vice versa.
Yet the short story almost never does more than present a negation in
its purest and simplest form. Consider Maupassants Boule de suif (Ball of
Fat), a story which shows that it is a prostitute who is a true patriot, rather
than the good citizens who scorn her.34 The setting is the war of 1870 in
which France was defeated and invaded by the Prussians. A group of
bourgeois residents are fleeing Rouen by coach to protect themselves and
their belongings, while proclaiming that they are resolute patriots ready
to fight to the end. A prostitute, nicknamed Ball of Fat because she is
small, round and fat as lard, is also leaving town by the same coach.35
Rejected and humiliated, she is nevertheless the only one to show herself
capable of greatness of spirit. She refuses to yield to the Prussian officer
who is detaining them all, and thinks, speaks and acts with a noble sense
of pride. The bourgeois characters, on the other hand, behave basely and
finally force her to make love to the Prussian so that they can continue
their flight. These characters are vilified by Maupassant for their stupidity,
cowardice and hypocrisy. The reader sees before him or her nonentities
who are perfectly predictable, even if the extremities to which the text takes
them are beyond what the reader would have imagined: pious nuns, for
example, draw on biblical quotations to exhort Ball of Fat to give herself to
the Prussian. Is it only because these are secondary characters? No, because
Ball of Fat herself is treated in the same way: the text simply reverses a
prejudice, it turns it upside down. The central antithetical tension contrasts
the classic image of the prostitute-pariah with that of the prostitute-patriot.

35 Ibid, p. 6.
This inversion is frequently found in short stories, and one of the

obvious uses of tension is to renew a theme by taking the opposite view
of a ready-made image. But it is clear that the battleground for discussion
has not changed, that the terms of the problem are pre-determined: is
the prostitute a person capable of greatness of soul? Bourgeois prejudice
answers: no; Maupassant replies: yes, and much more so than the
townsfolk. He thus does not change the usual way of thinking. He
contradicts pre-existing presentations, but he is still tied to them. Similarly,
at the end of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, we are not left with a character from
a novel (neither completely good, nor entirely bad), but the coexistence
stretched taut between two extremes that never mingle.
In conclusion, we can turn to the problem that Mary Doyle Springer
raised without being able to solve: the difficulty of determining with any
certainty the main character of Jamess The Aspern Papers.36 What troubles
Springer is that the principal character seems to be the narrator, but, at the
same time, James seems to deny him the stature of a hero; for example, in
the preface to The Golden Bowl he says that this witness is intelligent, but
quite unindividualised.37 I agree that the essential character is the narrator,
but I think that what we just saw makes it clear that what is important to
James, here as well as in his other short stories, is not the individual.38 What
interests him is to see the ins and outs of a situation, of a case, a problem
confronting a given character.39 I think given should be understood in all
its meanings: a precise character, but also a character whom he does not
36 Mary Doyle Springer, Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 167-248.
37 Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Scribner, 1962), p. 329.
38 Although he sees real psychological interest in Jamess stories (pp. 86-87), Scofield (2006)
says of Julia Bride: Its subject is slight but intense (Julia Brides situation is complex but
she is not a morally complex heroine) (p. 82).
39 As the character in Broken Wings exclaims: Were simply the case (here: of having
been had enough of). Edel, XI, p. 232. The little story is associated in the Notebooks
with the subject: The great question of the subject surges in grey dimness about me. It
is everything it is everything (Notebooks, p. 135). Recurring in the Notebooks, are the
terms little drama (p. 168), little action (p. 148), concetto (p. 144); and problem
(the simple effect that I see in the thing. This effect is that of the almost insoluble
problem, ibid, p. 168). See also Clare Hanson: The subject [of the late nineteenth
century tale, as opposed to the plotless short fiction] is the situation extraordinary,
bizarre, extreme in some way which is usually referred back to the response of an
ordinary, typical human being, Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 18801980 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985), p. 6.
need to build for us to recognise, a character he need only to evoke through

some of its characteristics.40
As far as The Aspern Papers are concerned, these attributes are in fact
reduced to their most simple expression; for us to understand and take
pleasure in the text, it is enough for the hero to be intelligent, and have a
true passion for the memory of the poet Jeffrey Aspern, in whose name
he is ready to commit (and will in fact commit) anything vile. To say that
the narrator is not individualised is not to say that he is secondary, but
only that we are in a short story, and that therefore the interest does not
lie in a person, a character, but in an event and a structure, from its initial
preparation to its realisation.
Finally, it might very well be that Springers question itself is influenced
by the fact that she is dealing with short stories. Short stories do indeed
almost always have a main character, and minor parts. Great novels
generally dont. Who is the main character in The Wings of the Dove or
The Golden Bowl? Who in Balzacs La Rabouilleuse? What distinguishes the
character in a novel, as opposed to that in a short story, might well be a
tendency to a fusion of opposites, no longer experienced as contrasts but as
alloys; they are hybrids, resistant to stereotypes. The heroes of short stories,
even the main characters, however, embody the coexistence of opposite
extremes.
40 Springer (1976) is very aware of the supremacy of the situation; she remarks that James
certainly loved character, character in its fullest and subtlest development [] But he
loved one thing more: that the character should be true to the formal requirements of the
story in which it appeared (p. 138).
5. Conclusion to Part I
The techniques we just reviewed combine to make the classic short storys
structure an efficient whole. Each of the characters traits is brought to its
ultimate intensity by means of paroxysm; thus making the character an
ideal representative of his type. Because this makes the character abstract,
the short story can easily and rapidly incorporate him in a strong structure.
Similarly, because the structure the staging of the situation prevails
over the study of individuals, reliance on a type is not a handicap, and
the readers entrance into the story can be accelerated by the use of
preconstructed material. Paroxystic characterisation, a structure built on
tension, and techniques of acceleration are, therefore, all closely linked.
They are not juxtaposed traits, but interlocking folds of a single, unique
phenomenon. It is their powerful convergence that makes the classic short
storys format so efficient.
Hypotyposis and schematisation

Despite the necessity of these techniques, they can still appear to be
somewhat schematic. How is it that the classic short story is rarely
criticised for this schematization? Why do readers never see the constantly
exaggerated aggrandisement of the characters and why are they never
made uneasy by this overwhelming action that sets one extreme inexorably
in opposition to another? There would seem to be three reasons for this.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.5
The first is that, at the end of the nineteenth century as opposed to

the beginning, there were few exceptional characters, either very good
or very bad. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Thophile Gautier and Edgar Allen Poe
were deceased, and the heroes of Goethes Novelle were in the past. The
primary character at the end of the century was essentially mediocre: an
offspring of Gogols malenkii chelovek (the little man) who haunts not
only Russian literature but also that of the rest of the world. The working
man in Maupassant, Verga or O. Henrys short stories, the lacklustre heroes
of Akutagawa or Joyce: these are the great battalions of heroes at the end of
the century. Regular citizens without any pretence, they are actually men
of little substance. It is the ordinariness of their appearance that hides the
essential fact: they are paragons of mediocrity.
The second reason, perhaps, is that very often the classic short story
focuses on a subject that already exists socially and of which the reader
already has notions, but which has never been represented in literature. As
we have seen, during that period, the character types are not often wellknown literary types. On the contrary, the short story explores the social
world, and readers and critics alike have been impressed, with reason, by
the great variety of characters. This hides the fact that the reader already
has preconceived ideas of these new characters, and that the classic short
story will do no more than develop (along familiar lines) what is already
known.
But the main reason seems to me to be that the structure itself is hidden
by one of the genres essential traits: its evocative strength. The sharpness
of the antithetical tensions is hidden by descriptions that paint portraits
of characters and the setting they are placed in with an extraordinary
vividness.1 What gives the masterpieces of the genre their greatness is the
particularly effective use of what ancient rhetoric called hypotyposis: a
lively and striking description, a picture through which the description
1
For example, Sean OFaolain sees in this evocative power the great charm or alchemy
of Alphone Daudets stories: Touch upon touch does it. The fine day, his nook in the
rocks where he lies like a lizard and listens to the pines, his key put into the cats hole
[] It is the details that do it. However, he takes pain to distinguish this from mere
description: but is the heart which remembers that really does it. Sean OFaolain, The
Short Story (Cork: Mercier, 1948), p. 90. Frank OConnor argues that the surface of a
great short story is like a sponge; it sucks up hundreds of impressions that have nothing
whatever to do with the anecdote. A contrario, he judges severely most of Maupassants
stories where style is sacrificed to anecdote. Frank OConnor, The Lonely Voice: A Study
of the Short Story (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 66.
Conclusion to Part I75
seems to make us see rather than conceive.2 If we turn to the numerous

mediocre short stories found in the newspapers of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the structure and the exaggerated treatment of
material are obvious. It is the evocative power of the great stylists that gives
the genre its value.
It is this balance of abstract and concrete, of powerful descriptions and
schematic material, which distinguishes the short story from allegory or the
mediaeval exemplum.3 Abstract truths are established through the tangible
flesh of the plot and its characters.4 The lesson is not explicit but rather
submerged in the mass of concrete details. In contrast to the ideological
novel, the short story usually provides the definition of characters by
extension through the enumeration of characteristic traits and not by
comprehension, through concepts. The strong structure helps the readers
immediate comprehension of what is at stake and far from impeding his
or her pleasure (as it does in the mediocre stories), this schema enhances it.
Short stories, sensational news items and serials

Hypotyposis is also what distinguishes the short story from the genres
it rubbed shoulders with in fin de sicle newspapers: the serial and the
sensational news item (le fait-divers). The three genres exist in and through
the media, to which they largely contributed, even giving to the European
press at the end of the century its specific stamp. Like the short story,
2
This is often stressed by readers and critics. See for example Luigi Capuana on Vergas
characters: we have the feeling we have seen them in reality and not read about them;
Luigi Capuana, Verga e DAnnunzio (Bologna: Cappelli, 1972), p. 24 and p. 74. Clare
Hanson argues that the short story is more concerned with vision than with feeling;
Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (New York: St. Martins Press,
1985), p. 124. OFaolain (1948) acknowledges that one does really feel, smell and see the
poorhouse , in Ernst Ahlgrens Mother Malenas Hen (p. 209).
3
James recalls his own hatred of allegory in his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
[Allegory] is apt to spoil two good things a story and a moral, a meaning and a
form. Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 62. For
more on the mediaeval exemplum, see Andr Sempoux, La Nouvelle, in Typologie des
sources du moyen ge occidental, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); and Hans-Jrg Neushafer,
Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle: Strukturen der Kurzerzhlung auf der Schwelle zwischen
Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1983).
4
The necessity of this concrete form is also stressed by Tsutsui Yasutaka (one of the very
few Japanese critics to have written on the short story after the lively discussion of the
form in the literary journals especially Bungakkai in the early 1980s). Tsutsui argues
that the short story demands an organic adequation to the subject and the invention of
new forms. Tsutsui Yasutaka, Tanpen shsetsu kgi (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), pp.
157-67.
the sensational news item presents narrative elements carried to their

extreme; it deals with events that transgress nature or the normal order
of the world.5 Like the short story, it presents without fail an antithetical
tension, in the particularly lucid form of the paradox. Le fait-divers always
deals with events such as sisters abused by their brother, or children killed
by their mother: radical incompatibilities, contrasting in a single structure
extremes which should never come into contact.6 The protagonists in the
short story as in the sensational headline are reduced to a few sharply
defined traits, and never leave their actantial role except to embrace
the diametrically opposite role, the one which is essentially rendered
impossible by definition (the respectable mother who is also a murderer;
the love for her son that makes the mother prostitute).7 Again like the short
story, the sensational news item has to anchor its subject matter in the most
current daily events: these descriptions take up a great deal of the article, as
well as the geographic localization (In Paris).
Is, then, the short story a branch of popular literature, functioning
along the same lines? To get a clearer idea we must examine another
comparison: the serialised novel.8 Here again, several similarities can be
seen. The serial also demands an oxymoronic tension (titles include Chaste
and Sullied or Countess and Beggar). Again, it relies on material already
familiar to the reader, on pre-existing formulas and characters, and is sold
in more everyday places that are passed by the reader on a daily basis
(news stands, railway stations and street vendors instead of bookstores).
Its value comes from the familiar not the new.9 However, whereas the
serial barely dresses up familiar situations and characters, the short
5 Fait-divers was a genre in its own right at the turn of the century. In every newspaper,
the reader was (and still is) sure to find at least one, sometimes two in the tabloids. See
Roland Barthes chapter Structure of the Fait-Divers, in his Critical Essays, trans. by
Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 185-96; and
Georges Auclair, Le Mana quotidien: structures et fonctions de la chronique des faits divers
(Paris: Anthropos, 1982). More recently, see also Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, Petits
rcits des dsordres ordinaires: les faits divers dans la presse franaise des dbuts de la IIIe
Rpublique la Grande Guerre (Paris: S. Arslan, 2004).
6
Of course, this is as true now as it was in the nineteenth century; see, for example, the
recent headline in Le Figaro (10 December 2012): Woman prostitutes herself in order to
pay for her autistic sons medical treatment (translation ours).
7
See Auclair (1982), pp. 19-26 and 90-104.
8
Charles Grivel surveys the history of novels in France between 1870 and 1880, and his
study is in a large part made up of popular novels. Charles Grivel, Production de lintrt
romanesque (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). For a general analysis of serials see the excellent
Anne-Marie Thiesse, Le Roman du quotidien (Paris: Le Seuil, Points, 2000).
9
See Thiesse (2000), pp. 19-26 and 90-104; and the conclusion to Grivel (1973).
story, on the contrary, gives the impression of something new through the
accumulation of striking and concrete details and through the choice of
unexpected scenarios. In addition, whereas popular novels deal not only
with familiar characters, but also always with the same characters, the short
story explores the entire social field in order to introduce ordinary people
and pariahs, often disdained by previous literature. The short story, like
the serial, is dependent on the readers pre-existent representations; but
nonetheless it does not depend on worn-out subjects.
By resorting to the same formulas as serials or sensational news items,
the short story can hasten the readers introduction to the fiction. The
antithetical tension is present in the short story because of its powerful
ability to create a structure strong enough to satisfy the occasional
reader, as discussed by Anne-Marie Thiesse, whose reading implies a
certain kind of inattention.10 The serial gets the attention of readers who
may be inadequately prepared for the intellectual exercise of reading. The
short story, on the other hand, will give to readers who are used to more
complex reading the peculiar pleasure of an immediate entry into the
fictional world.
The short story: privileged object of narratology

It is not difficult to see why formalist critics Grard Genette, Tzvetan
Todorov and Roland Barthes, for example have been drawn to analysing
short stories.11 Admittedly, the champions of formalism have often declared
that they only turned to short stories for reasons of pure and simple
convenience: in order to understand how a complete text functions, a short
text was thought to be an easier choice.12 But that choice has been much
more successful than expected, or, in other words, the conclusions they
drew are subordinate to the form itself. They did not describe the function
of all narration, as they claimed; what they have described in detail is the
10 Thiesse (2000), p. 55.
11 As Lohafer puts it: the short story was the favorite demo narrative form for New
Criticism. Susan Lohafer, Introduction, in The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short
Story, ed. by Rick Feddersen, Susan Lohafer, Barbara Lounsberry and Mary Rohrberger
(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. ix.
12 Barthes, for example, justifies his choice of text as follows: I needed a very short text to
be able to master entirely the signifying surface Roland Barthes, Textual Analysis
of a Tale By Edgar Poe, Poe Studies, 10:1 (1977), 1-12. See also Grard Genot and Paul
Larivaille, Etude du Novellino (Paris: Presses de lUniversit Nanterre, 1985); and Tzvetan
Todorov, Grammaire du Dcamron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp. 11-13.
structure of the short story. What these critics see as the essential role of
isotopisms, for example, is only essential because the texts they are looking
at are short stories, which use antithetical tension as their basic frame.13
Similar work on a novel is impossible. The reason is not that the length
of a novel would overwhelm the signifying oppositions; it is that the
effective novel renounces this structure as too simple, rejects the too-clear
precision, the light without shade. The novel patiently constructs more
complex truths, just as it carefully builds its characters instead of letting
them spring fully equipped into the mind of the reader.14 We have seen an
example of this in the work that led Henry James from the short story to his
novel The Ambassadors.
Indeed, a second reason for the natural attraction of semiotic analysis
towards the short story rests in the treatment of character. The short story
can be said to belong to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the epic as opposed to
the novelistic side of literature.15 The character in a novel is not summed
up by his role, he has what Bakhtin calls a personality that is more
than the sum of his traits; whereas the character in a short story seems
to be defined by the few traits attributed to him. This is reminiscent of
the actantial schemas of semiotic analysis: as Romano Luperini clearly
saw, short story characters are not more than their actantial role, and were
perfect material for the discovery of this critical tool.16
The classic short story always chooses situation over characters.17 One
can certainly defend this, like Genette who cites Aristotle in defence of the
13 The Groupe dEntrevernes reveals a series of secondary isotopisms (the semiotic
isotopisms) used within a main isotopism (semantic isotopism). This is putting to
light the secondary antithetic tensions that, as we have seen, reinforce and stabilise the
principal tension.
14 I am of course talking of the great novels here; there is not much interest in comparing
successful short stories with mediocre novels. Less successful novels, moreover, have a
strong tendency to work with the usual tools of the short story (if we think of Eugene Sue
or of the popular novel). Admittedly, Genot tried to apply the principles of narratological
analysis to a novel. But that novel was Pinocchio, which cannot be considered far from
popular literature, nor of very great complexity. Grard Genot, Analyse structurelle de
Pinocchio (Pescia: Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, 1970).
15 M. M. Bakhtin, Epic and Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by
Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.
4-40.
16 Romano Luperini, Verga: lideologia, le strutture narrative, il caso critico (Lecce: Millela,
1982).
17 This is perhaps the essential difference between the classic short story and what I have
called the modern short story, practiced from 1900 onwards, or the epiphanic
short story, as discussed by Mary Rohrberger and other Anglophone critics. See Mary
Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); also
absence of the character.18 I do not wish to discuss this position here, but
want simply to note that such an analysis is particularly suited to short
stories. When she was teaching creative writing, Flannery OConnor
demanded of her students a very detailed study of the summaries of short
stories: for one whole year her students were only permitted a maximum
of four lines in which to draw their characters. The emotion of the classic
short story is contained in the idea and the situation, not in the characters
or the shades of meaning.
Structure has often appeared to be the tangible point at which one
could hope to define the genre of the short story. Poes famous comments
on Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to characterise the short story through
this expedient: the singleness of effect, obtained by the convergence of
absolutely all the effects.19 The Russian Formalists also defined the short
story by way of its composition (contradictions, parallels, contrasts, etc),
while, as we saw in Chapter Two, Ludwig Tieck defined the genre by the
presence of a narrative reversal, the Wendepunkt.20
However, even if we can bring to light an in-depth series of constants,
that does not necessarily mean that they contain the key to the genre. It
seems to me that the main thing we should keep in mind is the congruence
of means, and the adequation to an effect. The features we have described in
this section are not laws; it could be that a particular short story may not
characterise its material in any extreme fashion, that it may not have a strong
structure, nor rely on the readers preconceptions. Yet, during the period
Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story: How I Got Hooked
on the Short Story and Where It Led Me, in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction
Theory and Analysis, ed. by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei (Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 1-13. The latter abandons the anecdote,
and, with it, that very precise organization and the somewhat stifling effectiveness of the
genre.
18 Grard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Vincent Descombes clearly defines the limits of
narratology. Among others, he shows that Genettes analyses of Proust were not able to
account for the novelistic character of la recherche du temps perdu. See in particular the
analysis of Genettes summary of the novel, a summary which Descombes who is also
relying on Aristotle sees as far too simple, schematic and ultimately wrong. Vincent
Descombes, Proust: Philosophy of a Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
19 See Poes review of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales, in Charles E. May, The New Short
Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 59-64, and his essay The
Philosophy of Composition, pp. 67-69.
20 See Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey
Archive Press, 1990), pp. 52-70; and Ludwig Tieck, Ludwig Tiecks Schriften (Berlin: G.
Reimer, 1828-55), XI, p. lxxxvi.
we are studying, almost all the short stories are constructed in this way.
Even for writers as subtle as James or Chekhov, this structure guarantees
that effective economy of means that is so often praised in the genre. But
these techniques are no more than means, technical solutions, and we need
to go further, and analyse their effect. Our task in Part III will be to show
how the use of these means changes the fundamental relationship between
the reader and the author on the one hand, and between the reader and
the characters on the other. But first, we must examine the media through
which these texts were conveyed to their readers.
PART II: MEDIA
6. Exoticism in the Classic

Short Story
Stevensons short stories were written originally for

periodicals. For the sake of acceptance, Stevenson had
to study the market; as he understood it, that market
flourished when the literary commodity sold by the
periodical was escapist, highly colored, and unobtrusively
moral in its implications.1
Harold Orels remark about Robert Louis Stevenson does not apply to all
short story writers at the turn of the century, but his three essential points
can be given a general application. Almost all short stories were written
for periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century; as such, the author
needed to adapt to a market and a pre-existing public (the readership of
the periodical in which he published). Moreover, Orel points to the great
law of the classic short story: exoticism. This may be surprising or shocking
considering that exoticism so overused in the preceding era was
known to be rejected by the Naturalists and, indeed, there are fewer texts
that are exotic in the strict sense of the word in the end of the nineteenth
century. But the term can be used to indicate in general the essential distance
between readers and characters in the classic short story.
Almost everywhere in the world the golden age of the classic short
story is intimately connected with that of the press. The periodical grand
purveyor of fiction enthusiastically welcomed short narratives, along
1
Harold Orel, The Victorian Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l986), p.
127. On the extent of the influence of publication in periodicals, see too John Hellmann,
Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1981).
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.6
with serials and sensational news items2. The genre developed within this
privileged framework, and Orels remark reminds us that such symbiosis
between periodical and short story is heavy with implications for how
stories were written at this time.
The role of the press

The rise of the press at the end of the nineteenth century profoundly
transformed the literary landscape.3 The arrival of the penny papers made
it possible for everyone to buy one or more newspapers a day; the number
of titles and the print-runs were enormous.4 Writing for the newspapers
2
This is one of the great differences between the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first. Charles E. May calculates that the total number of stories
in wide-circulation magazines per year in America is less than a hundred; the rest of
the very many stories appear in reviews or journals of which the subscription lists are
largely limited to university and college libraries, so they often go unread. Charles E.
May, The American Short Story in the Twenty-first Century, in Short Story Theories:
A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. by Viorica Patea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp.
299-324 (p. 299).
3
Among the features that are associated with this rise: the growth of general education,
technical inventions (the rotative printer, the invention of half tone which reduced
the cost of printing colours); the rise of publicity; changes to American copyright laws;
and a new European law that abolished the need to present the texts to a censor before
publishing. In Europe, these changes all happened around 1880. See Andrew Levy, The
Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 31-35 and Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds.), Dictionary of Nineteenthcentury Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press and London: British
Library, 2009).
4
The Library in Florence subscribed to 1,360 titles in 1891 and, in a call for papers in an
exhibition in Italy, 1,800 periodicals are mentioned (Nuova rivista, 12 December 1882).
See Orazio Buonvino, Il giornalismo contemporaneo (Milan: R. Sandron, 1906); Valerio
Castronovo and Nicola Tranfaglia, Storia della stampa italiana (Rome: Laterza, 1976); and
Franco Nasi, 100 [i.e. Cento] anni di quotidiani milanesi (Milan: Comune di Milano, 1958).
In France, Le Petit Journal (le plus grand des petits the largest of the small press
as it calls itself proudly) reached a print-run of 220,000 copies in l872, 825,000 in l884
and exceeded one million in 1890. This enormous figure does not mean that it reigned
alone: Le Petit Parisien had print-runs that varied from 350,000 to 700,000 copies between
1890 and l900. See Francine Amaury, Histoire du plus grand quotidien de la IIIe Republique,
Le Petit Parisien, 1876-1944 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). See also
Pierre Albert and Christine Leteinturier, La Presse franaise (Paris: Secrtariat gnral du
gouvernement, La Documentation franaise, 1978); Claude Bellanger, Histoire gnrale
de la presse franaise. 3, De 1871 1940 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). For
detailed data, see Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle au tournant du sicle en France, Italie, Japon,
Russie, pays anglo-saxons. Maupassant, Verga, Mori gai, Akutagawa Rynosuke, Tchekhov
et James (doctoral thesis, Universit Paris 4-Sorbonne, 1990). Part II of the thesis, which
is on the short story and the press, is available at http://rare.u-grenoble3.fr/spip/spip.
php?article341 (accessed 7/11/13).
Exoticism in the Classic Short Story85
became an important part of an authors income: from France to the United

States to Japan, authors particularly those of short stories more or
less lived off their earnings from newspapers.5 Anton Chekhov is known to
have supported his whole family in Moscow thanks to his contributions to
the press. Luigi Pirandello was able to supplement his meager professors
salary with his short stories, and he found himself in deep financial trouble
when this outlet was no longer available to him. As a young man, Henry
James responded with some acrimony when his father suggested that he
publish his first works at his own expense, and James instead turned to
the periodicals. In the beginning he obtained contracts for travelogues, and
his first short stories were published soon after. Later, around 1887, James
found himself in financial trouble when some periodical editors were slow
to publish his manuscripts. Leon Edel shows that the problem went deep:
for James, losing the press as an outlet for his work virtually meant losing
his status as an author, or at least as an author who was read.6
5
For details of Chekhovs income from newspapers, see Boris Esin, Chekhov Jurnalist
(Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1977). More generally on Chekhov and
the press, see Vladimir Kataev, Sputniki Chekhova (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo
universiteta, 1982) and Literaturnye sviazi Chekhova (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo
universiteta, 1989). For Henry James, see Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York:
Harper & Row, 1965). For Maupassant, see Grard Delaisement, Maupassant, journaliste
et chroniqueur; suivi dune bibliographie gnrale de loeuvre de Guy de Maupassant (Paris:
A. Michel, 1956); Andr Vial, Guy de Maupassant et lart du roman (Paris: Nizet, 1954);
and Florence Goyet, Lexotisme du quotidien: Maupassant et la presse, in Maupassant
multiple, Actes du colloque de Toulouse, Presses de lUniversit de Toulouse-Le Mirail,
1995, pp. 17-28, available at http://rare.u-grenoble3.fr/spip/IMG/pdf/Maupassant_et_
la_presse_-M-_multiple-_Toulouse-.pdf (accessed 22/10/13). For the new conception
of authorship in the Naturalist period in general, see Yves Chevrel, Le Naturalisme
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), ch. 9, and more recently Dominique
Kalifa, Philippe Rgnier et Marie-ve Threnty (eds.), La Civilisation du journal: histoire
culturelle et littraire de la presse franaise au XIXe sicle (Paris: Nouveau Monde ditions,
2012), and Marie-Franoise Melmoux-Montaubin, Lcrivain-journaliste au XIXe sicle: un
mutant des lettres (Saint-Etienne: Editions des Cahiers intempestifs, 2003). In Japan, at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the big newspapers hired authors to whom they
could guarantee sufficient revenues that they need not work elsewhere: Akutagawa was
contracted to Mainichi in the 1920s.
6
Edel (1965). See also Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An
International Act (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1985); and Michael
Anesko, Friction with the Market: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986). Anesko makes short work of the myth that would have
James confined to his ivory tower, writing for the happy few: the entire beginning
of his career was that of a very successful author. Even when he was having difficulty
publishing his novels, he continued to publish his short stories. The regular income from
periodicals was higher than all the earnings that James and the majority of authors ever
received for their books.
Not only did the press provide the money that allowed writers to make
a living, it also provided them with most of their readers. The numbers
speak for themselves: 3,000 copies in one or two years would be considered
excellent sales for a collection of short stories, whereas 30,000 copies was
normal for any periodical of the time. Giovanni Vergas collection Vita dei
campi (Life in the Fields), constantly cited in articles as a bestseller, sold around
5,000 copies in ten years.7 Guy de Maupassants Les Contes de la Bcasse (The
Deaf Mute), considered a huge success, sold 4,000 copies between September
1882 and February 1884. This represents seven successive editions. Which
means that for each of the additional editions, the publisher decided not
to publish more than 300 copies. Clearly, even best-selling authors such as
Maupassant (together with Zola the author with the highest print run of
the time) was not expected to sell more than a few thousands copies of his
stories.
On the other hand, when Verga published his short stories in the
newspaper Fanfulla, 23,000 copies were sold; and when Maupassant
published in Le Gaulois or Gil Blas, the print run was in the order of 30,000
copies.8 Thus, without even mentioning the giants of the small press
and their hundreds of thousands of copies, the newspapers of average
circulation represented an infinitely larger audience than the readership
of collections.
Exotic subjects
The thousand or so stories I have surveyed for this study have exotic
subjects at their core, with only a handful of exceptions. There is almost
always a radical difference between the characters in classic short stories
and the readers for which they were written. Sometimes what we find is
exoticism in the strict sense: although there was a movement away from
7
Verga wrote this in a letter to Luigi Capuana, Lettere a Luigi Capuana, ed. by Gino Raya
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1975), p. 77. Verga advised his friend to follow the same custom
as he had of issuing a small print-run of the first edition: 2,000 copies, which made it
possible, if it were a success, to print a second edition within the year; this means that
a successful book might achieve a circulation of 4,000. Even for Life in the Fields he had
to wait ten years for a third edition. See Carla Ricciardi, Introduction to Giovanni Verga,
Tutte le novelle, ed. by Carla Ricciardi, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), vol I.
8
It was the same in Russia: when giving a story to the journal Novoe vremya, Chekhov was
addressing about 35,000 readers, and Novoe Vremya was far from being the periodical
with the biggest circulation. See F. A. Brockhaus and I. A. Efron (eds.), Entsiklopedicheskii
slovar, 82 vols and 4 supplements (St. Petersburg: Granat, 1890-1907), sub loc.
locating stories in exotic locations at the end of the nineteenth century, it

was not completely abandoned, and the short story is one place where
foreign settings persisted.9 Stevenson was not the only one to set his work
in distant countries: Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville developed the
dramatic potential of a sailors life; Ambrose Bierce dedicated himself
to describing the unfamiliar world of the American frontier; while Jack
London wrote of the Great North. Meanwhile, Maupassant provided
vignettes of life in Northern Africa in short stories such as Allouma or Un
soir (One Evening).
Rudyard Kipling, who became instantly famous with his Indian tales,
continued to produce exotic short stories throughout his life, from his early
Indian accounts, to his tales of South Africa, and other stories of soldiers,
sailors or animals.10 His short stories were first published for the ex-pat
community in Lahore, for whom they represented a more immediate record
of an exotic life. But it was the English who made Kiplings success. In his
autobiography, the author explains that the exoticism of his subjects was
what made Mowbray Morris, the editor of Macmillans Magazine, pursue
him enthusiastically on his return from India.11 Even Jamess stories of the
international theme were drawing on exoticism, giving to his American
readers the spectacle of the seemingly great differences of life in Europe,
and vice versa.
As for the Japanese, they often chose as their subject the world of the
West: there are innumerable stories, beginning with Mori gai and Nagai
Kaf, that reference Germany, France or America. Temporal exoticism
was also popular: a great many of gais stories were historical and
Akutagawa Rynosuke set most of his tales in the distant past. Frequently
the latter would take his inspiration from mediaeval chronicles, amplifying
traditional tales of gods and famous men of history, but also of the Brigands
or the petty nobles of the Heian court. Fantastic short stories could also
9
Scofield notes in relation to American short stories: The short story was frequently
the form chosen by writers introducing such new areas to a still predominantly East
Coast reading public: it could give brief and vivid glimpses of new and exotic places
and ways of life. Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 8. Scofield demonstrates this in some
detail using the examples of Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce.
10 David Trotter is very clear on the topic of Kiplings English perspective on India
following his school years in England. See his introduction to Rudyard Kipling, Plain
Tales From the Hills (London: Penguin, 1995).
11 Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (Rockville,
MD: Wildside Press, 2008), p. 78.
be described as exotic in their description of the other; they play on the

sometimes infinitesimal but always crucial distance between the normal
and the strange world. Similarly, James often focussed on the character of
the Great Writer, in all his difference from ordinary men.
But the principal form of exoticism at the end of the nineteenth century
is what might be called social exoticism. The majority of Maupassants
stories, as well as those of Verga or Pirandello, and of the young Chekhov or
Joyce, focus on the lower middle class. Their subjects are often prostitutes or
other pariahs of society, but also average working men, petty bureaucrats
or peasants. I conducted a survey of the forty or so periodicals in which
most of the short stories of Verga, Maupassant and Chekhov appeared, and
found that they each had a specific audience, of which the characters in the
short stories were almost never members.12 The short stories about working
people and peasants appeared in newspapers intended for high society
(Maupassant, Verga) or satirical papers (the young Chekhov). Stories about
provincials were appearing in the newspapers of the capital cities: Milan,
Rome, St Petersburg and Moscow. The point here can be summed up in one
word, the epithet Benedetto Croce used for Maupassant: pariginissimo.13
When Maupassant was writing about the provinces, he was a Parisian
speaking to Parisians.
Maupassant was bound by contract to Le Gaulois and Gil Blas for the
exclusive rights to all his future work. The difference between these
two periodicals has often been stressed: Gil Blas was a light newspaper,
somewhat licentious, to which Maupassant gave the short stories and
chronicles that he could not have offered to Le Gaulois because they would
shock its readers, especially women. But the two newspapers shared a
great deal in common: both were accessible only to members of high society
because of their price (15 and 13 centimes) and their subjects. Le Gaulois
contained worldly gossip and high-society news only of interest to those
who knew the people alluded to, news from abroad, and accounts of official
receptions. Gil Blas offered political news side by side with pieces of scandal,
12 Details of this survey can be found in Goyet (1990), available at http://rare.u-grenoble3.

fr/spip/spip.php?article341 (accessed 7/11/13).
13 [] pariginissimo, libero, malizioso, beffardo, sarcastico novellatore Guy de Maupassant.
Benedetto Croce, Poesia e non poesia (Bari: Laterza, 1923), p. 307. See also Fusco: To
the cosmopolitan Parisian [ie Maupassant], the Norman peasant and world probably
appeared as a distant and alien being and place. Richard Fusco, Maupassant and the
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 16.
and the publications of the Official Journal; it also gave weather reports for
chic resorts and foreign cities. Regular topics included: Chronicle from the
[Parliament] Chamber, Behind the Scenes in Finance, and Paris Affairs:
From the Council [of Ministers]. The paper offered some financial news
and a little culture: on the whole nothing of any great intellectual breadth
but very worldly. Advertisements in Gil Blas are very similar to those in Le
Gaulois sometimes even the same.14 They both included notices for hotels
and expensive houses for sale, for example, a Unique mansion, Opera
quarter, 20,000 fr. a year, or a Factory, in Aubervilliers [a suburb near
Paris] with mansion, as well as mortgage and investment funds, period
furniture, etc.15 It was these two elegant periodicals that published short
stories about urban employees who worked for eighteen hundred francs
a year, and about provincials in Normandy who were shown as simple,
coarse and greedy.
Verga published most frequently in the supplement of the Fanfulla.16
This was a very expensive periodical (24 lire per year), published in Rome,
and considered fashionable enough for the Princess of Savoy-Aosta to be
photographed holding it.17 French was quoted without translation and there
were daily reports from the stock exchange, foreign book announcements
and reviews, and advertisements for expensive products. Literary and
theatrical reviews appear side by side with society clippings on the foxhunting season (using the English term), or Princess Marguerites visit to
San Remo. It was here, or in even more sophisticated periodicals, that Verga
14 On 17 March 1886, for example, both newspapers ran the same advertisement for period
furniture.
15 The archives of Le Gaulois and Gil Blas are accessible via the website of the Bibliothque
Nationale de France. The issues described here are at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k7523230x/f3.image.r=gil%20blas.langFR,
and
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k525695q/f4.image.r=Le%20Gaulois.langFR (accessed 07/07/2013). The contrast is
great with advertisements in the small press: there, instead of reports of the stock
market, we find reports of the wholesale prices of one particular product (meat, material,
corn, etc). The ads have little in common with those of Le Gaulois or Gil Blas (except
the universally advertised cough lozenges pastilles Graudel). Watches are advertised
at 5, 12.5 and 18 francs; furs from 3 to 50 francs. There are session reports from the
Paris Municipal Council not the Council of Ministers. Le Petit Journal (1 January 1887),
available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k609266n (accessed 22/10/13). These
(leftist) popular periodicals would often include rants against Paris Municipal Council
members who indulge in dners fins at 30 francs per person. LIntransigeant (1 January
1891), translation ours.
16 Verga published 29 short stories (out of 70) in the Fanfulla della Domenica.
17 The photograph of the princess with Fanfulla is in the private collection of the Villa
Torrigiani at Camigliano near Lucca.
published his stories about the peasants of far-away Sicily, the opposite
end of the readers world.18
The key to this contrast and this distance is given by the beginning of
Vergas short story Pentolaccia: Lets do as if we were at the cosmorama
[] Theres Pentolaccia, hes quite a type in himself.19 Pentolaccia is a
jealous provincial, who is all the more striking for having long accepted
his wifes infidelities. La Venera has been the mistress of Don Liborio for
years; an affair which, by the way, made Pentolaccia a rich man. The entire
story is told in the colloquial language of peasants, and the text is full of
comparisons between these people and animals (hens, mules and a bull).
The gulf separating high society readers from the jealous country bumpkin
is central to this text. The mention of the cosmorama a typical feature
of working-class amusement parks at the end of the nineteenth century
indicates that we will be looking at a fixed and distant image. There, as
Verga himself describes in the text: during a country fete, if we put our eye
to the glass, we can see everything pass before us from Garibaldi to VictorEmmanuel (where the narrator who says we is a Sicilian peasant).20 The
cosmorama signifies the naive pleasure of country people as they discover
the beauties of a wider world. They are happy and content to see as if real
their king or heroes. For the readers of Fanfulla the perspective is, of course,
reversed: they were living in the world of Victor Emmanuel, and it was the
provinces and the working people, the Pentolaccias and the Lupas, the
poor Sicilian muleteers and fishermen, whom they were looking at in this
way.21
Chekhov provides another symbol of this kind of distance. On his return
from a trip to Sakhalin, Chekhov published a landmark study of the convict
18 LIllustrazione italiana (eleven stories), La Fiametta (Gli Orfani); La Domenica letteraria

(Libert; Il Canarino del n. 15; La Chiave doro). La Cronaca bizantina (which published
Conforti, a particularly sordid affair) was perhaps the most famous review of the time,
the very symbol of the elegant periodical: titles, layout, advertising style, graphics, tailpieces, quality of texts and signatures were all of an extreme refinement.
19 Giovanni Verga, Tutte le novelle, ed. by Carla Ricciardi, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), I,
p. 208.
20 Ibid, p. 209.
21 The same gulf existed between Vergas readers and his characters from the urban working
population of Milan. Franco Ferrucci shows Verga in these stories as the occasional
visitor, the passer-by who was gathering impressions from the streets, looking for the
daily pathos: The working class world is seen through the eye of the philanthropist,
as Russo stated, or, what is ultimately the same thing, of the sociologist in search of
typical examples. Franco Ferrucci, I Racconti milanesi del Verga, Italica, 2 (1967), 124
(translation ours).
prison, as well as two stories whose heroes were Siberian convicts or exiles.
His story V ssylke (In Exile) paints the terrifying and hopeless picture he had
seen on his way there. What is of interest to us is that the story appeared
in Vsemirnaya illustratsiya, a Russian review homologous to the French or
Italian Illustration: twenty well-illustrated pages, with plates and polished
presentation. It contained the obituaries of famous Russians, but also Polish,
English and French personalities, which appeared side by side with society
news items, and long articles on topical events like the Panama affair. It
was a beautiful and expensive publication at 15 roubles a year.22 For the
readers of Vsemirnaya illustratsiya, an account of the desperately hard life of
the exiles in Siberia was as exotic as a story of another country.
Chekhov gave many of his early short stories about provincials to the
satirical papers of the two cities which played the role of capital in Russia:
Moscow and St Petersburg. For the readers of these two metropolises, he
repeatedly returned to the eternally popular theme of the shortcomings of
the provincials characters who appeared ridiculous to his readers simply
because they lacked urban sophistication. The tone of Chekhovs short
stories in the satirical press was direct, and the characters are caricatured
to such an extent that they would have been deeply offensive to those who
were the subject of the ridicule. But the people living in the provinces had
no opportunity to read these papers, nor did they have access to them if
they had wanted to. Similarly the poor peasants of Normandy could hardly
enjoy reading the short stories of Maupassant in which they are portrayed
as we shall see later in some detail. The point is that the authors could
be as satirical as they liked, because the papers in which these stories were
published would in no way lose a sale from an angry or offended customer.23
Verga and Chekhov also frequently published in the intellectual journals
the thick journals (tolstye zhurnaly), as they were called in Russia.24
22 I have only seen the regular edition of Vsemirnaya illustratsiya; there was also a deluxe
edition, which cost twenty roubles.
23 Although subscriptions to all the great daily newspapers were sold throughout the
country, as well as abroad, these periodicals were only ever accessible to the same rich
and worldly people. Yes, nobles living on their estates in Normandy read Le Gaulois. But
Le Gaulois was precisely a link with the capital, a sign of belonging to the elegant circle,
like the outfits ordered from Paris. Reading it gave them the pleasure of belonging to
the Parisian world, and separated them from their provincial surroundings. As Levy
(1993) puts it in describing the New Yorker of Poes time: designed to appeal to those
social elites in each town and city that considered themselves honorary New Yorkers
representatives of a wealthy, cosmopolitan class (p. 20).
24 Verga published eighteen out of his seventy stories in them. Chekhov, from 1888 on, was
a regular contributor, especially to Russkaya Mysl and Severny Vestnik. This is not true of
These played a great role in the intellectual life of the time. Naturalism,
as is well known, was the expression of a period when artists felt deeply
concerned with the social and political state of their countries. This was
also true of the educated public at large, especially in Italy and Russia: they
were ready to read serious and demanding publications. The Rivista nuova
di scienze, lettere e arti, Rassegna settimanale di politica scienze, lettere e arti
and Nuova rivista in Italy, and Russkaya mysl, Severny vestnik and Zhizn in
Russia were austere periodicals, of more than two hundred pages. They
offered regular articles on military affairs, geography, moral philosophy,
political analysis, descriptions of and reflections on political institutions,
and many reviews of books, both scientific and literary.
The short stories in these publications were on quite a different footing
from those published in the worldly newspapers. Appearing side by side
with statistical studies, reflexions on the administration of the provinces or
reviews of books on philosophy or agronomy, they illustrated with all the
force of pathos the horrifying state of the nation. There was just as much
distance between the reader and subjects of short stories in these journals
as in the daily newspapers, but the gap was of a different kind: it was the
intellectuals distance from his object of observation and reflection in what
was a quasi-ethnographic document. For the readers of these intellectual
publications, short stories offered a kind of scientific reflection; the ultimate
aim being to transform reality.
The constraints of the newspapers

Newspapers imposed restrictions on authors, the most obvious being
that of length: Kipling, in the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, was
allowed exactly a column and a quarter for each of his Plain Tales From the
Hills; James, throughout his career, never ceased to complain of the 5,000
word limitation imposed on him. But let us remember that the short story
sometimes continued through two or even three issues of the paper, so the
restriction on length was not absolute. Another constraint was adamantly
imposed on the author: since he was publishing in a periodical, he had
to adapt to his public. As we know, newspaper editors were particularly
Maupassant. His only contribution to intellectual publications was, to my knowledge, a
few stories reprinted in La Revue bleue, the newspaper of the French Sorbonne, which did
not play the same role as the many and admirable intellectual journals used by Verga
and Chekhov.
attentive to the reactions of their readers. Gabriel Tarde insisted on the

importance of the barometer provided by the number of subscriptions, and
all the studies of the press show a good editor to be a constant observer of
his publics taste.25
As we have seen, classic short stories were mostly published in
newspapers that their provincial or popular objects of satire did not read.
There are, however, a few counter-examples, all of which seem to prove
the rule that the most successful classic short stories relied on some form
of exoticism. Joyce, Proust, James and Maupassant each tried to publish
stories in which the readers could recognise themselves. These are arguably
among their greatest failures. Joyces misfortunes in publishing Dubliners,
for example, are well known: the editor of the The Irish Homestead only
published three of the ten or so stories he had ordered, and it took almost
ten years and the intervention of Ezra Pound for the collection to see the
light of day.26 Critics tend to see this as the result of the crude work of a
complex and extended censorship (judicial, social and psychological) to
quote Etienne Sarkany.27
It seems to me, however, that the problems with Dubliners essentially
came down to Joyce rejecting the conventions of short story publishing at the
time, by trying to have his stories read by those who were most involved.28
25 Gabriel Tarde, LOpinion et la foule (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989 [1901]).
26 See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Robert
Scholes, Some Observations on the Text of Dubliners: The Dead, Studies in Bibliography,
15 (1962), 191-205; Hans Walter Gabler, Introduction to Dubliners, by James Joyce, ed. by
Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 1-24. A summary
of the texts publishing history is also given in Jeri Johnson, Introduction to Dubliners, by
James Joyce, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. xlii-xlvi.
27 Etienne Sarkany, Forme, socialit et processus dinformation: lexemple du rcit court laube
du XXe sicle (doctoral thesis, Diffusion Universit Lille III, l982), pp. 354-73 (p. 357,
translation ours). Sarkany dedicated a whole section of his thesis to Joyces difficulties
in publishing the stories from Dubliners (with conclusions radically different from mine).
Johnson (2001) also sees the origin of the negative judgements on Joyce in the fact that
he described what had almost never been described: Readers have more than once
responded to Dubliners by feeling that the stories were cold, unsympathetic, distanced,
clinically dissective, mocking. [] They have described it as naturalistic (that odour of
ashpits and old weeds and offal, the pervasive air of disillusionment, its detachment).
Such criticisms make sense of one aspect of Dubliners, that through which Joyce calmly
addresses matters which in the first decade of the last century were seldom mentioned
in literature: poverty, drunkenness, bullying, child-beating [] (p. xii). Which does not
prevent her from seeing that it was indeed on the part of Joyce defamation (see p. xi
and note 10).
28 Levy (1993) observes the way in which institutions preside over short story writing today:
By agreeing to enter a creative writing workshop, we implicitly agreed to write, or learn
to write, literature that would be socially sanctioned (p. 5; see also pp. 11-26). The idea
Joyce was unable to achieve publication for a broad Irish public because
the stories lacked the usual distance between readers and characters. When
George Russell wrote to Joyce suggesting that he send short stories dealing
with Ireland to The Irish Homestead, he defined for him a formula for his
readers expectations: it was a question of writing something simple,
rural, livemaking, pathos.29 We should not look on these as idle words
from Russell he knew the Irish intellectual and literary world well, in
an Ireland at the height of its Gaelic euphoria, when folklore and national
traditions were elevated to the level of myth.
It is Joyces concept that is in question here, and a concept of which
he himself was very conscious. In Dubliners he made an accusation of the
hemiplegia which he saw as paralyzing his country; he envisaged his texts
as an opportunity of educating his fellow citizens.30 The saying is famous:
the Dubliners would be a nicely polished looking-glass, which he would
hold up to the people of Dublin to see themselves as they are, so that they
could improve. It was a case of wanting deliberately to confront the Irish
with his stories, and he refused to follow the advice of his brother to try to
publish them in the French papers instead of the Irish.31 The Irish Homestead
refused to continue the publication after the third story, telling Joyce too
many readers were complaining.32 Joyce, then abroad, nevertheless wrote
the ten stories he had intended to send to the magazine, and more, and
looked for a publisher. At first, the editor Grant Richards accepted Joyces
that institutions of writing play a crucial role in shaping the genre is widely recognised.
See for example, in Japan, Tsutsui Yasutaka, who stresses the role of prize-contests in the
development of the Japanese short story. Tsutsui Yasutaka, Tanpen shsetsu kgi (Tky:
Iwanami Shoten, 1990). See also Hashimoto Kenji on the importance of the nineteenthcentury American short story as mass entertainment. Hashimoto Kenji, Amerika tanpen
shsetsu no kz (saka: saka Kyiku Tosho, 2009).
29 The letter reads: Could you write anything simple, rural?, livemaking?, pathos?, which
could be inserted so as not to shock the readers. Quoted in Johnson (2001), p. xli.
On the press in Ireland at that time see, for example, Karen Steele, Women, Press and
Politics During the Irish Revival (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). Steele
describes Russell as one of the great men in the Gaelic Renaissance movement, with its
philosophy of a redemptive rural civilization (p. 189). He was editor from 1905 of The
Irish Homestead, weekly organ of the Irish Agricultural Organisation, which supported
young Irish authors.
30 See Joyces well-known letter to Constantine Curran: I am writing a series of epicleti
ten for a paper; I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or
paralysis which many consider a city. James Joyce, Letters, ed. by Stuart Gilbert and
Richard Ellmann, 3 vols (New York: Viking Press, 1957-1966), I, p. 55.
31 Similarly, Joyce distributed his pamphlet entitled The Holy Office amongst the
intellectuals of Dublin, with the intention of their self-improvement.
32 See Sarkany (1982), p. 360.
manuscript, but after the printer refused to print the texts, retracted his
offer. The reason given was that coarse language was used. But even when
Joyce finally submitted and made all the demanded substitutions, Richards
refused to publish the book as did no less than fifteen other publishers.33
If we think of the publishing conditions of short stories in that period,
things are quite clear. In a famous letter to Richards, Joyce himself outlined
the problem very precisely, stressing that the portraits he had drawn were
unacceptable to the readers, who for once were the very models: The
printer denounces Two Gallants and Counterparts. The more subtle inquisitor
will denounce An Encounter []. The Irish priest will denounce The Sisters.
The Irish boarding-house keeper will denounce The Boarding-House. [...].
And in the same letter: I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write
without offending people.34 Joyces eventual success in publishing the
book points in the same direction: Joyce owed the publication of Dubliners
to an external intervention, that of a foreign literary institution, in the
person of Pound.35 It was the international reader that made the book
finally publishable, but even then only 1250 copies were printed. This was
very far from the large readership of a magazine like The Irish Homestead,
and it meant that very few of the intended readers got a chance to see it.
Joyces desire to educate the middle-class people of Ireland was frustrated.
Marcel Prousts first volume, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a collection of short
stories and poetry, encountered similar difficulties.36 Proust published
some poetry from this future collection in Le Gaulois, but his attempts to
publish the short stories were thwarted.37 His letters at the time show him
asking his friends to help him convince Le Gauloiss director, Arthur Meyer,
as well as other newspapers directors, to take them; other letters show him
33 Johnson (2001), p. xliii.
34 Letter of 5 May 1906 (Joyce, Letters, II, p. 134).
35 Although success is perhaps not the right word. See Johnson (2001), calling it a
disheartening process (p. xliii).
36 Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days: And Other Writings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1957).
37 An example of Prousts poetry can be found in Le Gaulois (21 June 1895), p. 2. It was
accompanied by a laudative comment from the editor: We are happy to give our readers
a front seat preview of some delicate verses by a charming young poet, Mr Marcel Proust,
of whom Le Gaulois has already published a few articles. These lines have been orated
recently at Mme Madeline Lemaires by Mlle Bartet, together with very pleasant music
by Mr Rinaldo Hahn (translation ours). I quote in extenso this comment: it shows we
are in a society circle in which nice verses were welcome, but harsh satire was not. For
a more detailed account of this publication, see Florence Goyet, Les Plaisirs et les Jours
entre nouvelle classique et nouvelle moderne, Bulletin dInformations proustiennes, 44
(2014).
offering the stories directly, but without success.38 Most Proustian scholars
tend to feel that these stories are not very good, and therefore they do not
question or explore the authors initial failure to have them published.39 Of
course, these stories compare unfavourably with la recherche du temps
perdu but, compared to the other short stories that were being published in
the newspapers at the time, they do not appear bad at all.
The problem for editors, once again, seems to be not so much the quality
of the work as the relationship between readers and characters. Proust
tried to publish his stories depicting high society and its shortcomings in
society papers. These papers did not want to present their readers with
their own caricature. The one exception seems to confirm the rule: La Mort
de Baldassare Silvande (The Death of Baldassare Silvande) was pre-published
in La Revue hebdomadaire.40 Yet this story was very different from the rest of
the collection (some of which were a direct attack on recognisable socialites
of the time, and all of which are harsh satires of fashionable urban life)
it was more of a metaphysical reflection on life and death, and only very
mildly satirical.
With this in mind, the case of James, the young American writer traveling
and living in Europe, becomes exemplary and emblematic: for years, he
published his short stories about America in Europe, and his short stories
about Europe in America. This yet again confirms his inspired intuition
concerning the genre. Michael Anesko shows that James obtained, for nearly
all his stories, a quadruple publication prepublication in journals in the
United States and in England, followed by publication in volume in both
countries.41 Among the few short stories that were not reprinted were the
38 Proust not only wrote to Meyer, but also to the director of La Revue Hebdomadaire, who
refused all but one very particular text (see note 40), and to other editors as well. In
a letter to Suzette Lemaire, he says I have tried with La Patrie, but failed, and at La
Presse too. Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. by Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970-1993), I, p.
388 (translation ours; hereafter Correspondance). I am speaking here of newspapers not
intellectual journals. Proust had good access to intellectual journals among them the
famous La Revue Blanche. As we have mentioned, the gap between reader and subject
is very different in these journals one can mock socialites in a journal of the avantgarde, especially in La Revue Blanche, which was then associated with anarchist authors.
See Paul-Henri Bourrelier, La Revue blanche: une gnration dans lengagement 1890-1905
(Paris: Fayard, 2007).
39 Albert Thibaudet wrote in the 1920s that Prousts short stories were mdiocres (see
Correspondance, XIX, p. 331). More recently, Thierry Laget has even given a precise
analysis of their shortcomings. Thierry Laget, Introduction to Les Plaisirs et les Jours, by
Marcel Proust, ed. by Thierry Laget (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp. 27-28.
40 La Revue hebdomadaire (29 October 1895), pp. 584-606.
41 Anesko (1986).
ones about the country in which he was trying to get them published; stories
that would have shown the readers their own image were not accepted.
Similarly Maupassants short stories about the working class were never
reprinted in the popular newspapers, although they did publish most of
his other stories. Maupassant was under contract to Le Gaulois and Gil
Blas for the original publication of his texts, but it was possible for other
periodicals to pick them up later. He became hugely popular in his lifetime,
and the reprints of his short stories were extremely numerous, especially
in the popular papers like Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, La Lanterne
and LIntransigeant, all of which were big publishers of fiction. But these
periodicals did not automatically reprint any text he produced. From the
long list of Maupassants short stories about the working class, only four
texts were reprinted in Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien. One of them
was Boitelle, whose hero, admittedly, is a young peasant from Normandy;
however the heroine is of African descent, and she is described in the spirit
of the purest exoticism.42 As for the rest, none of the most famous of the
Normandy stories were reprinted, nor those which depicted the life of the
employees at 1800 francs a year. Maupassant was also rejected by the
provincial papers. Only three of his stories, to my knowledge, appeared in
the provincial illustrated press between their publication and World War I,
compared with hundreds of reprints in the Parisian papers.43 His treatment
of provincials in his short stories, of which we shall explore at length later,
might very well explain their lack of enthusiasm.
These are rare cases of authors who tried to have their short stories read
by the very characters they portrayed, and failed. Short story writing was
a flourishing business when it met the absolute conditions of its medium.
It was up to the writer to adapt to the public for whom he was writing,
not the other way round. The people of Dublin were not fond of Dubliners
42 We shall return to Boitelle in Chapter Eight. Mon oncle Jules (My Uncle Jules) is equally
somewhat special: the uncle is one of the poor unfortunates who sought his fortune in
America, an exotic story for those who have never ventured far. The case of Fermier
(The Farmers Wife) and Petit soldat (Two Little Soldiers) are more open to discussion;
but even if we were to conclude that they are not exotic, there would still be only two
exceptions among the three hundred stories published by Maupassant. These stories can
be found in Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans.
by Artine Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 1308-12, 917-22 and
755-59 respectively.
43 With personal thanks to Jean Watelet for helping me to clarify this point. See Jean
Watelet, La Presse illustre en France 1814-1914 (Villeneuve dAscq: Presses Universitaires
du Septentrion, 2000).
any more than the peasants would have been of Maupassants Normandy
stories or the Russian provincials of Chekhovs satires. A condition for a
classic short storys success was to choose an unfamiliar or remote subject.44
One cannot publish just any short story in the periodicals: success depends
on a respect for the mediums own constraints. Editors selected the right
stories so effectively that one could fail to notice that it was impossible to
write anything else.
Exceptions to the rule

In all of the one thousand or so classic short stories I have surveyed, I have
found only one unambiguous exception to the law of exoticism: in contrast
to the other short story writers, Chekhov used his readers as characters in
many stories later in his career, from Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with Lapdog) to
Strakh (Fear) or Nevest (The Bride). These are what we might call transition
stories between the classic and modern form (which we will examine in
detail in Part III). There are, in addition, two more exceptions, but here
again these are exceptions that prove rather than challenge the rule.
The first is that of the narrators of frame-stories. Some stories, like
Jamess The Turn of the Screw, follow a structure inherited from Giovanni
Boccaccio: we are first introduced to a narrator who then proceeds to tell us
a story within the story. This narrator generally belongs to the same world
as the reader. He sets the mood before the real story unfolds. This narrator
is one of a small group (hunters, guests in a country house, etc), who gently
brings his readers into the warm intimacy of the circle around the fire or
the relaxed after-dinner atmosphere of a group of friends. He will then let
us hear the story as he heard it: because he has created a sense of familiarity,
we are ready to enter the world of the unusual. As we shall see in regard to
travelogues in the next chapter, this narrator is the intermediary who puts
the reader in contact with a foreign world.
44 This may not be a feature only of nineteenth-century short stories. Even if authors
generally moved away from the exotic in the twentieth century, readers in a few
countries at least retained their former taste for exotic short stories. It has become
common in France to complain of the publics disaffection for the short story. But on
closer examination, this disaffection only concerns French texts; foreign short stories
from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Jorge Luis Borges to Katherine Mansfield are widely
read. French short story writers today generally write about the immediate and topical;
the public would seem to prefer, as in earlier times, stories about the other side of the
world.
The second exception in our corpus involves the few stories, published
in the society newspapers, in which Verga and Maupassant talk about high
society. First we should note that, in these stories, the attitude towards
the characters is very different from the attitude towards workers or
peasants. Members of the upper class are not shown to have certain types
of behaviour that define them as a social group. The heroes are frenzied
hunters, busybodies, coquettes, adulterous women who cling desperately
to their lover: they are seen as unique individuals, and it is not likely that
the reader will identify with them. He will not feel challenged by the storys
ridiculing of them, and neither will their abusive or ridiculous behaviour
compromise the upper class as a whole.
These types of stories are very similar to anecdote, and the readers
involvement in them is quite different from the stories discussed earlier
in this chapter. Like the serialised novel or the sensational news items,
anecdote is a journalistic genre of its own: all the newspapers of the time
published anecdotes, including those of good repute. These short stories
are on the border of that genre, of the kind that is told at a dinner party: the
tall tale. The tension they are built upon usually relies on paradox, with
an end which brings an unexpected answer, one that introduces narrative
elements in an unusual combination, or at least is perceived that way.
Examples include Maupassants La Bche (The Log), Le Gteau (The Cake), Le
Verrou (The Lock), Mon oncle Sosthne (My Uncle Sosthenes), Sauve (Saved);
and Vergas Giuramenti di marinaio (Sailors Oaths), Carmen and Commedia
da salotto (Drawing-room Comedy). These high society short stories are
usually published in mens magazines like Gil Blas, and are close relatives
of the misogynist after-dinner tale. Here, too, the readers identification
with the character is unlikely. Distance is not brought by the difference
in social status, but in the amusement or irony with which the subject is
treated.45
Despite these few exceptions, the overwhelming fact about the
publication of short stories in newspapers at the turn of the century was
that the characters in these stories could not overlap with their readers.
Tales of peasants and workers appeared in fashionable periodicals that
were available to neither of these groups; short stories about the provinces
45 This is also the case in many of Jamess stories, where the characters are admittedly
of the same social circle as the author, but thrown by the author into eccentric, quasifantastic stories (The Private Life, Fordham Castle, Broken Wings). I will discuss this further
in Chapter Eight.
appeared in the newspapers of the capitals. There is always distance, and

this distance was largely a result of the commercial constraints of the press.
7. Short Stories and the

Travelogue
At the beginning of their careers, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant

wrote as many travelogues as they did short stories. The travelogue by
which I mean a factual article describing a journey to a foreign place
became another important item in the newspapers of the late nineteenth
century. We shall see in this chapter that short stories of that time shared
many characteristics with the travelogue, and that this had a direct and
important bearing on the short story as a genre. Authors in general and
these two authors in particular very often wrote travelogues and short
stories at the same time, and set them in the same countries. They also
sometimes published them both in the same periodicals.1 In the stories as
in the travelogues, the characterisation of the foreign world emphasised the
differences with the readers world.
Characteristically the writer of a travelogue plays the role of
intermediary. He belongs to the same world as the reader, and, during his
1
For example Jamess first published items were chronicles of a journey within the United
States. Then he went to Europe and returned with his first short stories. From then on,
and for several years, he published alternately and sometimes for the same periodical,
travelogues and short stories in which the action takes place in the same country. In
the case of Maupassant, there is a series of short stories set in North Africa, Afrique (The
Africans), Au soleil (In the Sun), La Vie errante (The Life of Wandering) and several texts about
the south of France and Corsica, published together with travelogues about the same
places. Chekhovs scientific description of a Sakhalin penal colony was in the same way
accompanied by the story V Ssylke (In Exile) published after his trip to Sakhalin.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.7
stays abroad, he gathers knowledge and impressions of a foreign country

that he will share with them. The important point is that he perceives the
foreigner with the eye of his own civilization; ideally he is an expert of
that country, but one who never forgets his origins. In this way, he can
describe the foreigner in terms that the people at home understand. Almost
always this involved the author adopting a sharply critical and, as we shall
see, superior tone.
For both authors Maupassant and James there is a striking
continuity between their travelogues and short stories: in the tales set in
exotic countries we shall find descriptions, judgements and explanations
that would not be out of place in the corresponding travelogues. We can
also find identical sentences in both the factual chronicle and the short
story.2 Sometimes a text begins as a travelogue and then goes on to narrate
a story: in Maupassants Un bandit corse (The Corsican Bandit), for instance,
the initial descriptions are like a travelogue, and then the transition is made
with the request, Tell me about your bandits, which introduces the
anecdote.3 The exact nature of the text is not always clear, something which
has proved difficult for editors. Louis Forestier, for example, included
in the body of his edition of Maupassants short stories many texts that
verged on the travelogue, but then relegates to his appendix one text which
has all the characteristics of a short story even though it describes effusively
the nature of Switzerland.4 This story is in the form of a letter written by the
author to someone staying in Paris a classic device of the travelogue
in which descriptions of the countryside and the customs are presented as
if the author were writing familiarly to the reader.
Praise of nature, criticism of culture

The essential feature of travelogues and the corresponding short stories
is something we also find in the genre of the exotic novel: the foreign
2
Louis Forestier draws many such parallels between Maupassants travelogues and short
stories. See the notes in his edition of Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by
Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), II, for example pp.
1673 and 1680 (hereafter Pliade).
3
Guy de Maupassant, Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine Artinian
(Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 902-04 (p. 903, hereafter Artinian). The
French text can be found in Pliade, I, pp. 436-39. Hereafter, the references are given first
to the translation, then to the original text.
4
Pliade, II, pp. 1261-70.
Short Stories and the Travelogue103
landscape is seen as delightfully picturesque and praised unreservedly,

while its inhabitants, their customs and their institutions are shown as
strange, bizarre and inferior.5 The narrators of short stories are almost
invariably dazzled by the astonishing beauty of a foreign land. Whether it
is James striding through the Old World, or Maupassant passing through
North Africa, the discovery of a different landscape is at times breathtaking: tourist attractions in Italy, the gorges of Chabet, or the Algerian
coast, all give rise to long emotional outpourings.
James, for example, presented the spectacle of America to the British
readers of the London magazine Cornhill. His description of Broadway in
An International Episode begins with these words:
Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the
interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travelers
advanced looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation
of the sidewalks, the high-coloured heterogeneous architecture, the huge
white marble facades, glittering in the strong, crude light and bedizened
with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners and streamers,
the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horse-cars and other democratic
vehicles [] the white trousers and big straw-hats of the policemen.6
We have here a long list of things that might astonish two Englishmen
on landing in America, and James, as a good chronicler, does not forget
a single picturesque element: the enormity of everything (huge,
heterogeneous, extraordinary number), the white trousers of the
policemen, the democratic transportation. He emphasises the confusion
of the English, and their conviction that it must be impossible to find a bath
in such a country. And then they found that a bath was not unattainable,
and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated
immersion with which their apartment was supplied.7 What is clear in
each of these cases is the desire to make a different reality visible: to be the
5
There are many well-known texts on exoticism, for example, Edward W. Said, Orientalism
(New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 2004); and Albert Wendt, Introduction to Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English
Since 1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), ed. by Albert Wendt, pp. i-ix.
For a study focussed specifically on the short story, see Catherine Ramsdell, Homi K.
Bhabha and the Postcolonial Short Story, in Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story, ed.
by Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Joseph Longo and Mary Rohrberger (Westport,
CN: Praeger, 2003), pp. 97-106.
6
Henry James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (New York:
Rupert Hart Davis, 1960), IV, pp. 243 (hereafter Edel).
7
Ibid, p. 244.
cicerone for readers to whom one explains an unfamiliar reality, often in

enthusiastic terms.
But when it comes to describing the people, or their way of life, the
tone is dramatically different. From the moment that the topic is no longer
the landscape, judgements in both the short story and the travelogue are
almost always in favour of the readers country.8 Anton Chekhovs V ssylke
(In Exile), discussed in the previous chapter, is an obvious example: the
very aim of the story was to bring the publics attention to the horrors
of a world where there is neither hope nor values.9 Nature is depicted
as extraordinary: not as breathtakingly beautiful, as it is in Jamess or
Maupassants chronicles, but as unfathomably harsh, a country where, at
Easter, the earth is still solidly frozen, where rivers are disastrously swollen.
Of course, in this terrible world, where the customs are as horrifying as the
living conditions, there is no common ground with the world of the readers
of the expensive Vsemirnaya illustratsiya.
James also emphasised the moral superiority of his own country and
the disagreeableness of some foreign customs. Despite the emotion roused
by the beauty of Europe, institutions and customs compare unfavourably
to those of America. The status of women is the source of an entire series
of comparative commentaries. Travelling Companions explicitly states the
difference between the Old and the New World when it comes to gender
roles. The narrator is an American raised in Germany who is traveling
through Italy. He is, of course, enthusiastic about the beauties of Milan. But
he meets there an American girl, and he is just as thrilled by the discovery
of a more liberated femininity in his own far-away home country that he
has grown up barely knowing. He bows to the moral superiority of his
original nation: there was a different quality of womanhood from any that
8
The exceptions are not very convincing. Maupassants comment in Allouma is typical in
its facile misanthropy. The author finds himself in the middle of the desert and feels like
a different man, better for not participating in the mediocre life of his fellow Parisians:
how far I was from everything and everybody connected with a town-dwellers life.
Artinian, p. 1250 (Pliade, II, 1096). The story consists of raptures over the purity and
the naturalness of the wilderness, but without really threatening the characters deep
attachments to home. We will return to this story in Part III.
9
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Oxford Chekhov, trans. and ed. by Ronald Hingley, 9 vols
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971), VI, pp. 89-96. The Russian text can be found
in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983), VIII, pp. 42-50. Nature is described in the same way as before, although this
time the style is horror; Chekhov insists that nature in Siberia is profoundly different
from that familiar to the Russian reader.
I had recently known; a keenness, a maturity, a conscience , which deeply

stirred my curiosity.10
Similarly, At Isella, also written for an American readership, is on first
glance a celebration of Italys irresistible attractions for the young American
narrator.11 At the first inn after the border, the American meets a young
marchesina who is running away from her husband to join the man she loves
in Geneva. She is the embodiment of the concept of the Italian woman:
rich complexion and sombre eyes, consuming passion and nobility. James
makes this representation of a national type explicit: The Signora seemed
to me an incorporate image of her native land.12 Yet the young marchesina
discovers the freedom of American women, and this becomes a subject of
astonishment and reflection that takes a good deal of our attention in a
supposedly European tale:
What is said in your country of a woman who travels alone at night without
even a servant?
Nothing is said. Its very common.
Ah! women must be very happy there, or very unhappy. Is it never supposed
of a woman that she has a lover? That is worst of all.
Fewer things are supposed of women there than here. They live more in
the broad daylight of life. They make their own law.13
The authors comparison between European and American customs leaves

no room for doubt: America is the advanced country, the country with the
moral ingenuity and maturity to allow women equal freedom.
Jamess characterisation of foreigners as inferior is not always portrayed
as an explicit comparison: very often, his portraits speak for themselves.
His stories include a whole gallery of strange and unacceptable
foreign characters. The Italians are ingratiating and ready to profit from
the generosity of passing Americans (Giovanelli in Daisy Miller; the
archaeologist in The Last of the Valerii). The French are without conscience:
in Madame de Mauves, Monsieur de Mauves is the nobleman absorbed in
his own high birth and debauched like the unscrupulous aristocrats in The
American. Thodolinde is based entirely on the idea that Parisians are void of
any moral sense, and that their example can corrupt even an American. In
10 Edel, II, p. 178.
11 Edel, II, pp. 307-40.
12 Ibid, p. 327. Then, when the narrator suggests returning with her to Switzerland to help
her join her friend, he says: To go with you [] will be to remain in Italy, I assure you.
Ibid, p. 332.
13 Ibid, p. 330.
the preface to the New York edition of A London Life, James regrets having
made his morally bankrupt heroine an American when, on reflection in
his later life, he now sees her depravity as typical of an English woman
of the Prince of Wales set.14 But the young adulteress, while certainly
of American origin, is nevertheless living in London and driven into the
mire by an English husband, who is presented as a sort of monster. An
oxymoronic tension results from the opposition of customs: the story is
told from the sisters point of view, who has just arrived from America, and
cannot bear the sight of these European excesses.15
Perhaps it is Maupassant, though, who provides the most interesting
perspective on the subject of foreignness. Allouma explicitly develops the
world vision that underlies all these short stories.16 The central device here
is to have the story told by a colonial, M. Auballe. His long familiarity with
the Arabian world and his happiness to be living in the region give the
narrator and the reader confidence in him. He presents himself as having
knowledge of Algeria and he provides his public with descriptions to
help them understand the framework is the same as in a travelogue.
What is remarkable is that the speech in which he poses as the person
with knowledge is a sharp and definitive judgement of the people of that
country, as he develops the stereotype of the lying Arab:
The habit of lying is one of the most surprising and incomprehensible
features of the native character. These people [] are liars to the backbone,
to such an extent that one can never believe what they say. Do they owe it to
their religion? I cannot say. One must have lived among them to understand
to what a degree falsehood forms a part of their whole existence and becomes
a kind of second nature, a necessity of life.17
This very same narrator makes clear that the French can never truly
understand the Arabs, but this does not prevent him, in the same sentence,
from characterising them in six adjectives: unknown, mysterious, sly,
14 Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B.
Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 38.
15 At the end of his life, James no longer understood why he made it an international
story but in this context, things become clear: at this stage of his career, he used American
characters in sharp contrast to Europeans, to heighten the latters depravity and then
again, by contrast, to enhance the moral superiority of the Americans. The great novels,
however, brought about an evolution: this kind of caricature is not to be found after What
Maisie Knew (1897).
16 Artinian, pp. 1249-63 (Pliade, II, pp. 1095-1117).
17 Ibid, p. 1254 (p. 1103).
untrustworthy, smiling and impenetrable.18 He continues his stereotype

of the Arab with categorical judgements: An Arab, where women are
concerned, has the most rigorous standards coupled with the most
inexplicable tolerance.19 He then describes his paradoxical love of the girl
Allouma as being impossible because of her race:
[] one does not love the young women of this primitive continent []
They are too primitive, their feelings are insufficiently refined to arouse in
our souls that sentimental exaltation which is the poetry of love. 20
Maupassant had expressed almost the same opinion in the same terms
in one of his travelogues, The Wandering Life.21 His decision in Allouma
to have what could be regarded as highly biased opinions about Algeria
endorsed by a character presented as an expert, with the self-assured
tone of a guide, makes the judgement final. Foreign men are mostly
demonised in Maupassants African short stories, whereas women, like
nature, are seen as exotically beautiful, if still backwards and morally
questionable. He often talks about love with native women, following a
well-worn topos of exotic literature:22 the women are depicted as being all
the more beautiful for being some sort of wild animal.23 In effect, the praise
of the womens beauty must always be linked with that of nature; and
the desirable if animalistic allure of their bodies is set in contrast to their
negative behaviour. In Allouma the narrators lover is described in terms
that are the hallmark of the exotic sublime:
Her white body, gleaming in the light admitted through the raised flap,
seemed to me to be one of the most perfect specimens I had ever seen []
She had an unusual face: with regular, refined features with a slightly animal
expression, but mystical like that of a Buddha.24
18 Ibid, p. 1255 (p. 1104).

19 Ibid, p. 1255 (p. 1105).
20 Ibid, p. 1256 (p. 1107).
21 See Forestiers comparisons (Pliade, II, p. 1680).
22 To his fictive addressee of the story Marocca, Maupassant had indeed promised amusing
love stories: You ask me, dear friend, to send you my impressions of Africa and an
account of my adventures, especially of my love affairs in this seductive land. You
laughed a great deal beforehand at my dusky sweethearts, as you called them. Artinian,
p. 577 (Pliade, I, 367). On this topos, see, for example, Frantz Fanon on the hoax Je suis
Martiniquaise (1948) in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), where
Fanon criticises the vision of herself that is given by the narrator, and pretended author,
a young mulatresse.
23 She was a wonderful, a delightful animal, but no more, in the form of a woman.
Artinian, p. 1261 (Pliade, II, p. 1114).
24 Ibid, pp. 1251-53 (p. 1101).
Does this mixture of bestial imagery and mysticism define a beauty that is
equal to that of the French? Not at all. What follows does not elaborate on
this feature of local colour (a Buddha in Africa!) but goes on to emphasise
only the absence of thought in the native woman:
I told you a little while ago that Africa, this bare artless country [sic], devoid
of all intellectual attraction, gradually overcomes us by an indefinable and
unfailing charm, by the breath of its atmosphere, by the constant mildness
of the early mornings and the evenings, by its delightful sunlight and by the
feeling of well-being that it instills in us. Well, Allouma attracted me in the
same way by numberless hidden and fascinating enticements.25
Maupassant then provides the key to Alloumas character by defining her

as the ultimate other: this creature of another race, who seemed to me to
be almost of another species, born on a neighboring planet.26
The end of Allouma is especially interesting: Maupassant manages the
transition from pure exoticism the setting of the Algerian desert to
social exoticism. Allouma occasionally leaves her white lover to return
to live for a while among the nomads. The Frenchman, bound to her by
powerful carnal ties, gives permission for these absences but he does not
understand them. He sees them as an imperious necessity for his mistress,
and he is even touched by the womans words: She pictured this to me so
simply, so forcibly and so reasonably that I was convinced of the truth of
it, and feeling sorry for her.27 The important point is that he does not
see her reasons as reasons, the product of a brain like his own. He sees
them as childish, animal-like caprices. Every time he speaks of her spirit, he
recognises in it a picture of nomadic life from the brain of a squirrel leaping
from tent to tent.28 The final departure of the young Arab woman with a
paroxystically repugnant shepherd leads to a meditation on women in
general, those of France, the finest and most complicated, as well as the
creatures of the desert.29 All of them seem strangers and strange to the
colonial man:
Why had she disappeared with that repulsive brute? Why, indeed? It may
have been because for practically a whole month the wind had been blowing
from the South. A breath of wind! That was reason enough! Did she know,
25 Ibid, p. 1256 (p. 1107).
26 Ibid (emphasis mine).
27 Ibid, p. 1260 (p. 1113).
28 Ibid, p. 1254 (p. 1103).
29 The shepherd is described paroxystically as the antithesis of the Occidental upright
man; he is a repulsive brute. Ibid, p. 1262 (p. 1116).

do any of them, even the most introspective of them, know in most cases
why they do certain things? No more than a weathercock swinging in the
wind. The slightest breeze sways the light vane of copper, iron, or wood, in
the same way that some imperceptible influence, some fleeting impression,
stirs and guides the fickle fancy of a woman, whether she be from town or
country, from a suburb or from the desert.30
There has been an attempt to give a little nobility to this type of judgement by
calling it a meditation on the changing heart of women.31 It is important,
however, to note that the two essential features of this concept of feminine
character foreign and unacceptable are developed through the many
comparisons to animals.32 This type of discourse is perfectly in tune with
what was generally written about women in the light and somewhat
licentious newspaper that the Echo de Paris was at that time.33
It would be easy to be malicious about Maupassants misogyny and
racial stereotypes.This is not my intention here. On the contrary, what is
important to note is that, in spite of this, Maupassant is one of the great short
story writers, for whom love and women are a privileged subject. The short
story permits this use of simple and simplistic concepts, and it can build on
dismissive character types that would be unacceptable elsewhere; it uses
them when the great novel could not. What would be quite unbearable
in another context has not prevented him from being appreciated by
generations of readers, including women. We are facing a crucial feature
of the genre, which can make powerful use of extremely simple, and at
times almost base, features. In these short stories, as in travelogues, the
narrator is a guide who is one of us, an intermediary who speaks the
same language and possesses a knowledge that he bestows on us.34 But this
knowledge does not allow the reader to understand from within the logic
of the world the narrator is describing. The reader can taste all the sensual
joys of African life and the countryside, but he or she cannot enter into the
inhabitants vision of the world.
30 Ibid.
31 See for example Pliade, II, p. 1684 (Forestiers note to Le Rendez-vous).
32 On this topic, see Part III, especially Chapter Eight.
33 On the magazine cho de Paris, see Pierre Albert and Christine Leteinturier, La Presse
franaise (Paris: Secrtariat gnral du gouvernement, La Documentation franaise,
1978).
34 Scofield says of Bret Harte: Perhaps part of the novelty was the treatment of this rough
new world by a writer who was clearly educated and literate [] but who also knew the
mining camp world at first hand, while earlier he speaks of the reading public as being
still predominantly [of the] East Coast. Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to
the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 54 and 8.
From vision to judgement: guidelines for description

As we have seen, the classic short story usually depicts worlds that are
socially or culturally unfamiliar. We might expect, therefore, to find an
abundance of descriptions whose aim would be to inform us, to teach us the
characteristics of the unknown object. But such descriptions are extremely
rare. There are a few examples, as in Maupassants Le Colporteur (The
Peddler): As he approached I saw he was a hawker, one of those wandering
peddlers who sell from door to door throughout the countryside;35 or as in
Mori gai, when he describes Berlin for his Japanese compatriots: It was
one of those rooms called garrets which overhang the street and have no
ceiling.36
However, among the hundreds of short stories I have studied, there
are only a few instances of these potentially useful explanations. Instead,
there is an abundance of descriptions that develop all the details of objects
already known which create a distance between the reader and the subject.
As we saw in Part I, it is a question of beginning with a pre-existing idea
and developing this type in ways that do not necessarily challenge it. It
is not as in the case of the peddler or the garret to teach the reader
something he or she knows nothing about, but rather to replace an abstract
concept with a vivid concrete image.
In the classic short story we may learn in detail about the life of Sicilian
peasants and wandering comedians (Vergas collection Don Candeloro e
Ci [Don Candeloro and Company]), how one chops down an entire wood
(Maupassants La petite Roque [Little Louise Roque]), the nature of a vendetta
(Maupassants Un bandit corse [The Corsican Bandit]), life aboard a trawler
(Maupassants En mer [At Sea]), or the life of brigands in the Middle Ages
(Akutagawas Cht [The Brigands]).What these stories give us are the
precise, picturesque and moving details of the scene. However, they do not
35 Artinian, p. 538 (Pliade, II, p. 1253).

36 The quote is from The Dancing Girl (Maihime). See Mori gai, Youth and Other Stories,
ed. and trans. by J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp.
12-24; this is our translation, as the phrase in Rimers version is translated only as in a
room lit by an open skylight (p. 16). The Japanese text can be found in Mori gai, Mori
gai zensh, 38 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1971-1975), I, pp. 425-47 (p. 432). Maihime
is often described as the very first authentic short story [in the western sense of the
term] written by a Japanese (as opposed to the many kinds of short fictional genres,
from setsuwa to otogisshi to gkan or kokkeibon). J. Thomas Rimer, Three Stories by Mori
gai, in Approaches to the Modern Japanese Short Story, ed. by Thomas E. Swann and
Tsuruta Kinya (Tky: Waseda University Press, 1982), pp. 201-09.
change the abstract conception we already had of it. We were well aware
that the life of itinerant traveling comedians is an inextricable mixture of
grandeur and poverty. The short story is based on what is already known.
It may take its time to detail the contours, and give life to a scene, but it can
do this precisely because it does not need to create the essential concepts
from scratch.
The problem is that these are not pure concepts in the readers mind
they come with connotations and values. When one relies on the readers
knowledge of the objects, what is evoked is his preconception of them: the
atmosphere surrounding them, the value judgements with which they
are imbued. Descriptions in short stories are usually a point of view
rather than an explanatory analysis. Thus Maupassant describes the
peasant woman from Normandy explicitly as an archetype: the true type
of robust peasantry, half animal and half woman.37
These descriptions remind us of the approach taken by Gustave
Flaubert in his famous lesson of description. He gave Maupassant the
exercise of describing a taxicab from the point of view of what is absolutely
unique about it, in such a way that it differs from fifty others before or
behind it.38 This is generally thought to have endowed Maupassant with
evocative power of the kind that is evident in the classic short story in, for
example, its particularly effective use of hypotyposis that we saw in Part I.
But such an approach presupposes that the reader knows what a cab is, and
has the same notion of it from the outset. To separate out the individuality
of a particular specimen presupposes a notion of the cab that is common to
the author and all readers. However precisely, violently or sharply the cab
is described as being different from others, this description is based on a
generic notion, to which its individuality is only secondary. The reader will
never learn from Maupassant what a taxicab is.
We should remember that Flaubert first asked Maupassant not to
describe an object, but a grocer sitting in his doorway, a porter smoking
his pipe.39 Which means that, for people as well as taxicabs, he was relying
on what was generally evoked in the mind of the nineteenth-century
reader: in this case, a strong feeling of the pettiness of the petit-bourgeois.40
37 The quote is from The Mother of Monsters in Artinian, pp. 378-81 (p. 379); La Mre aux
monstres in Pliade, I, pp. 842-47 (p. 843).
38 Guy de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean: And Other Stories (New York: French Library
Syndicate, 1925), p. xvi.
39 Ibid.
40 We remember with somewhat of a shudder the vision given by a Jean Richepin of
By relying on the readers own concepts and immediately proceeding

to the highly coloured descriptions of the details, the writer never raises
questions about the underlying foundation of his scenes and characters.
One cannot question what has never been stated, but only presupposed.
The description recommended by Flaubert, and used so well by short story
writers, gives the storys archetypes life. Very logically in this context,
one of the most common remarks of admiring readers is that finally, this
is a portrait thats true to life!. One vividly sees Maupassants comical
peasants in their rustic farmhouse. But these images are, in fact, something
that has always been there.41
The prejudice that enters these archetypical descriptions is reserved
for the human rather than the natural realm.42 There are many moving
descriptions of the countryside, but never praise for the houses or
familiar objects.43 Nature does not offer any real challenge, it does not
call into question our values, because it does not bear the human mark.
Admiration of foreign nature is an easy way to praise oneself for ones
curiosity and tolerance. It does not involve absorbing what is different
from us. Together with travelogues, short stories indicate and explicitly
emphasise the difference separating us and them, through descriptions
and judgements of exotic people and customs. The result of this type of
presentation of the world is always the same: it gives both the author and
the reader a feeling of agreeable superiority over those who are different
from them. To use Chinua Achebes words about Joseph Conrads Heart
different social classes in Les Assis (The Penpushers), a famous piece that was often
reprinted in the newspapers of the time: Because for the penpushers, there is neither
spring, nor breezes, nor butterflies. The only greenery they know is the green of the
register covers. And they dont complain! So is it for us to pity these poor, bleary-eyed,
miserable creatures who have no desire to provide their shrivelled lungs with something
other than the thick, heavy, confined air stewing with the disgusting, mouldy odour of
old volumes, shabby clothes, leather cushions and seats of pants. Jean Richepin, Le Pav
(Paris: Dreyfous, 1883), pp. 290-91 (translation ours).
41 See Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1982).
42 The same dichotomy is found in the exotic genre par excellence: the colonial novel,
which is not known for its deep understanding of foreign people.
43 There are a couple of exceptions: Maupassants beauteous descriptions of the farmyards
of Normandy (although it could be argued that farmyards with their vineyards, apple
trees, poplars and arbours belong just as much to nature as to humans); and Vergas
Fantasticheria, which is a reverie not a tale, and more especially an indictment of the
worldly world of the listener through the intermediary of the simple life of the
peasants. However, even then, the praise of the peasant world is extremely vague: it is
about the beauty of place rather than of people.
of Darkness: the short story projects the image of Africa [we could add: of
Norman peasants or petty office workers] as the other world, the antithesis
of Europe and therefore of civilization.44
44 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p.
3. Heart of Darkness is a complex story, in which, as Achebe himself is well aware, the
main concern is with the hero Marlows own psychological journey. However, it also
exhibits much of the same distancing we see in the classic short story. Achebes famous
lecture of 1977, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness (pp. 1-20),
offers analyses of the same type I lead here and many of the quotations about savages
from Heart of Darkness could be taken from Maupassants Allouma.
PART III: READER,

CHARACTER AND AUTHOR
8. A Foreign World
If we were to define the classic short story in one word, it would certainly
be distance. This distance is very often recognised for individual stories,
but critics never, to my knowledge, see it as a characteristic feature of the
genre per se.1 There are two possible reasons for this. The first one is that
we share with the readers of the periodicals of the time the objectifying
distance from the characters. Nineteenth-century workers, provincials or
peasants are as far or rather further from twenty-first century readers
as they were from the readers of Milans Fanfulla or Pariss Le Gaulois.
For this reason, perhaps, we do not notice their ridiculing as acutely as
1
With the exception of Clare Hanson who sees the short story (as opposed to short
fiction) as having characters [that] tend to be viewed externally. Clare Hanson, Short
Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985), p. 6. And of
Andrew Levy, who even thinks this distance has not disappeared in the twentieth
century. Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 108-25. When analysing individual works, critics
often recognise this distance, very often in the form of irony. On the ironic detachment
of Chekhov, see Sean OFaolain, The Short Story (Cork: Mercier, 1948), p. 97. For
Maupassants pervading irony, see Richard Fusco, Maupassant and the American Short
Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1994), especially pp. 17-18. Postcolonial criticism, however,
usually does acknowledge the distancing of characters. We saw in Chapter Seven the
example of Chinua Achebe on Heart of Darkness: Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments:
Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday 1989), pp. 1-20. See also, for example, Bill Mullen,
Marking Race/Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of Genre,
1933-1946, in Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. by Julie Brown (New York:
Garland, 1997), pp. 25-46.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.8
we might. For example, we can see each of the stories in Dubliners as an

epiphany, and be sensible to their radiance;2 the Dubliners of the turn
of the century saw in them instead a powerful attack on their very essence.
The second reason is that critics tend to see the classic short story as
different in essence from the modern short stories that have been at the
centre of critical attention since Mary Rohrbergers and Charles E. Mays
influential studies of the 1960s and 70s.3 Critics tend to think that classic
stories represent a very limited naturalistic corpus that was practiced
only by minor writers. We have begun to see, however, that great authors
like Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello and Mori gai all wrote
classic short stories prolifically and were masters of the very specific laws
of the form that we have already seen. Critics tend to think that these great
authors are above the often simplistic and simplifying characterisation
that is inherent to this form. In fact, their greatness came from using the
somewhat limited features of the genre such as distance in a way that
generated masterpieces.
In this chapter, I shall attempt to show that distance is a defining trait
of the genre at the end of nineteenth century, not only in the so-called
naturalistic story, but also as it was used by great authors of the time.
This distance is put to use in many widely different ways: it can be used in
anecdotes, satire, stories of the fantastic, social commentaries and tales of
the countryside. One of the most interesting features of the short story is
that its generic conventions have the potential to be actualised in rich and
varied ways. However, at the time we are considering, the most important
form distancing takes is through a discrediting of the characters: they
are shown to be different in essence from the reader and the author. In
other words, the classic short story is a monologic genre, to use Mikhail
Bakhtins term, the diametric opposite of polyphonic: the character
does not have a consciousness with equal rights as the authors and
the readers; he does not have a full voice.4 Prostitutes in Maupassant
as well as women from the colonies are always seen as bizarre and
2
A commonly held critical view, from Hanson (1985), p. 7, to Rust Hills, Writing in General
and the Short Story in Particular (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 19-22.
3
See Mary Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre (The
Hague: Mouton, 1966); and Charles E. May (ed.), Short Story Theories (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1977).
4
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 6.
A Foreign World119
picturesque; their feelings, ways of life and opinions are all part of an exotic
spectacle.5
What we just saw in the last chapter makes this of no little consequence.
When discrediting a character, the short story is in fact discrediting the
other which, when it comes to the readership of the stories we are looking
at, mostly means the colonised, peasants, office workers, provincials or the
urban poor. The judgements the short story invites us to pass are not just
judgements on literary characters as different from persons which
would be of no great importance. These judgements are part of a broader
social attitude. Like the exotic novel in the colonial era, they are comforting
readers in the feeling of their superiority, by showing them how delightfully
strange, but ultimately inferior, these other people are.
In this third part of the book, we will begin by looking at the often
explicit and radical difference authors created between their readers and
their characters. The short story is much too subtle an art always to rely
on the obvious, however, so we shall then analyse the use of more indirect
rhetorical techniques. We shall dedicate a complete chapter to two of those
techniques that are generally associated with a characters proximity:
dialect the reproduction of ways of speaking that are specific to a
linguistic group and the relations between author, narrator and reader.
An explicit distance
The classic short story does not shrink from caricaturing its characters in
the most extreme ways. Even the greatest authors Chekhov, Maupassant,
Akutagawa, Verga and James all at times explicitly indicate how we
should consider the character, rather than relying on more subtle portraits.
We will not be surprised, of course, to find this in most satires, where the
ridiculing of characters is expected. In Chekhovs Smert chinovnika (The
Death of a Civil Servant) published in the humorous journal Oskolki
(Splinters) and widely republished in anthologies the hero is presented
throughout the story, paroxystically, as the incarnation of the type of
pitiful minor civil servant familiar to readers since Gogol. The whole story
is a development of this character type, and the narrative is based on the
5
Compare this to a novel like Crime and Punishment, which is all about Sonya being just
like us, with her voice of equal value to that of Raskolnikov, the judge Porfiry, or
the reader. Her ways of living and thinking act as a powerful source of reflection for
characters and readers alike.
grotesque bad luck that comes with it.6 As a kind of summing up of all
these elements, he is called Cherviakov (worm).
But such caricature is not to be found only in stories written for the
small press. In the beginning of En famille (A Family Affair), Maupassant
describes the people that can be found in the tramway:7 The few inside
consisted of stout women in strange toilettes, shopkeepers wives from
the suburbs, who made up for the distinguished looks which they did not
possess by ill-assumed dignity.8 And later:
In the suburbs of Paris, which are full of people from the provinces, one
meets with the indifference toward death, even of a father or a mother,
which all peasants show; a want of respect, an unconscious callousness
which is common in the country, and rare in Paris.9
The suburb where the characters live is described as the garbage district,
and the hero, on his mothers death, is described as revolving in his mind
those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical
commonplaces, which trouble people of mediocre minds in the face of
death.10 The situation is very clear: on the one hand there are the Parisian
readers of a high society journal, and on the other the people who live in
the suburbs, provincials who have not been civilized by city life, and
who have brought with them their brutish country ways. Let us note that A
Family Affair is not one of Maupassants minor short stories, but a text which
has been hailed by critics; not an anecdote for Gil Blas, but an adorable
short story [] a fine study of the dregs of the lower middle class, to use
6
At a theatre, a petty civil servant sneezes. No big deal. But he has sneezed on the head of
the person in front of him. Learning this person is a general, he apologises once, twice,
five times until the official is so irritated he quite harshly sends him away. Desperate,
the civil servant returns home and dies.
7
Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine
French text of this story can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed.
by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), I, pp. 195-218
(hereafter Pliade). A working-class family, the Caravans, learn of the death of their
grandmother, who lived in an apartment above them; they rush up to take possession
of the most precious objects before the other heirs arrive, planning to pretend that they
had been given to them by their grandmother, directly, in gratitude for what they had
done for her. An antithetic tension is created between the excessive efforts made by the
Caravans to ensure their possession of these objects, and the futility of these efforts. On
the one hand, the objects are hideous; on the other, the old lady is not dead: she wakes
up and solemnly gives them to the other members of the family.
8
Ibid, p. 1025 (p. 195).
9
Ibid, p. 1032 (p. 203).
10 Ibid, p. 1037 (p. 211).
A Foreign World121
an expression of the critic Albert Wolff:11 such methods of distancing did

not in any way bother the critics of the time.
Ridiculing the character does not destroy the short story; in fact it is
almost a defining feature, very similar to the prevalence of paroxystic
extremes. Endless numbers of heroes of short stories are described as
ridiculous by the narrators, from Maupassants Miss Harriet (ridiculous
and lamentable), to Pirandellos Donna Mimma (a ridiculous and
pitiful spectacle), to Akutagawas Goi in Yam Gruel (ugly to the point
of strangeness). What we have here is exactly the attitude that we saw
in Maupassants Allouma in the previous chapter: the judgement of the
narrator is assured, and is founded on the comfortable feeling of the white
mans/high society members superiority.
Maupassants characterisation of Allouma as an animal was not limited
to the native woman: it was also the standard way in which he described
peasants. I have listed at length the cases in which Maupassant uses animal
vocabulary to represent people.12 It ranges from descriptions of their
physicality (the old peasant just like a rat; What was it that opened it? I
could not tell at the first glance. A woman or an ape?; [she was] the true
type of robust peasantry, half brute and half woman []; [...] the brutal
sound of her voice, a sort of moan, or rather a mew),13 to descriptions of
their customs (in the country the useless are obnoxious and the peasants
would be glad, like hens, to kill the infirm of their species),14 and to their
domestic situation (the brats were crawling all over [] The two mothers
could barely distinguish their products in the heap [] the housewives
gathered their offspring to give them their mash, like gooseherds gathering
their creatures [] the mother [...] fattening her calf).15 What Maupassant
suggests here is a radical difference: peasants belong to a different species
(to use his own phrase from Allouma). It is not that the peasants are simply
different from us; they are expelled from the circle of human beings.
11 See Forestiers note in Pliade, II, p. 1343 (translation ours).

12 Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: description dun genre son apoge (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1993), pp. 140-44.
13 Autres temps in Pliade, I, p. 455 (translation ours); Old Mongilet in Artinian, p. 940 (Le
Pre Mongilet in Pliade, II, p. 468); The Mother of Monsters in Artinian, p. 380 (La Mre aux
monstres in Pliade, I, p. 842).
14 The Blind Man in Artinian, p. 900 (LAveugle in Pliade, I, p. 402).
15 The Adopted Son in Guy de Maupassant, The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories, trans.
by Albert M. C. McMaster, A. E. Henderson and Mme Quesada (Project Gutenburg, 2004),
available
at
http://ia600204.us.archive.org/9/items/completeoriginal03090gut/3090h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0137 (accessed 7/11/13) (Aux champs in Pliade, I, p. 607).
Again, this did not bother the critics of the time any more than the
characterisation of women especially exotic women as inferior. This
last example, Aux champs, is no more a minor story than A Family Affair. It is
even today often republished quite a favourite of short story collections of
Maupassant, in fact and at the time it had been selected by the magazines
of quite good repute: La Vie populaire, and Le Voleur, which presented the
story to its readers as a living study of the heart of peasants.16 My point
is not that these stories shouldnt be republished, but that it seems odd
that few critics, even today, comment on the brutal othering of these
characters. This type of extreme and unflattering characterisation is so
typical of the short story that it somehow goes unnoticed.
The classic short story did not shrink from stating explicitly that its
heroes are of a resolutely different humanity from its readers, but given
the subtlety of many short stories, it is not surprising that this effect is
often achieved through indirect, implicit means. Most frequently readers
will be left to draw their own conclusions about characters and events. As
in ironic texts, the reader has no need to be told that the characters are in
error; he knows it from seeing them believe in things that are clearly wrong
(known error proclaimed, as Wayne C. Booth calls it), or holding values
inferior to his or the authors (Booth calls this conflicts of belief).17 In Une
aventure parisienne (An Adventure in Paris), for example, Maupassant tells
the story of a chaste provincial woman, the wife of a notary, who comes
to Paris in order to see for herself the extremes of luxury and corruption
she is sure are hidden in the capital.18 Purely by chance, she meets one of
the great men of the day, and has the opportunity to spend a full day, and
even a night, with him. The whole point of the story is her disillusionment
at discovering that the mans famous and cherished reputation hides a very
unpleasant personality. The structuring antithesis is between what she has
imagined from reading the daily papers and the reality of Paris. In the end,
she plainly acknowledges her provincial error.
16 La Vie populaire was a weekly publication founded by the author Catulle Mends, with
long articles and well-known authors. Aux champs was first published in Le Gaulois on 31
October 1882; it was then republished in Le Voleur a well-respected publication that
specialised in the republishing of texts on 10 November 1883, and in La Vie populaire
on 1 October 1884.
17 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp.
57-60 and 73-75.
A Foreign World123
However, the Parisian readers of Gil Blas or La Vie populaire where

the story was republished19 had no need of this explicit denunciation to
enjoy the spectacle of her error. From the very beginning, they knew from
their own experience how much she erred, just from the description of her
thoughts. Sentences like she saw Paris in an apotheosis of magnificent
and corrupt luxury and there could be no doubt that the houses there
[on the boulevards] concealed mysteries of prodigious love make her
error as clear to them as any explicit statement.20 Similarly, there is no need
to state explicitly, as Maupassant does in En famille (A Family Affair), that
the clock coveted by the Caravans is ridiculous: one of those grotesque
objects that were produced so plentifully under the [Second] Empire.21
Readers of the elegant Nouvelle Revue would inevitably feel disgust for such
artistic atrocities as suggested here: the clocks apparatus is in the shape
of a young woman, and the pendulum is a ball with which she plays cupand-ball. This design was generally recognised in the 1880s as a contrived
and rather crude sexual symbol, and considered to be the height of bad
taste by anyone in intellectual or elegant circles. Here the characters are
as effectively discredited by Booths conflict of values as they would be
through direct characterisation.
The objective social distance which we have identified between the
readers of short stories and their characters is galvanized in the feeling of
that distance. In their ferocious and ludicrous struggle for a grotesque
object, the characters establish their distance from the reader who would
not for the world have it cluttering his room. Wolff, in the article where
he described Maupassants story as an excellent study of the dregs of the
lower middle class, stigmatised the Caravans rapacity and praised the
author for being a thinker. It is definitely an affair of the suburbs the
district where rubbish is deposited.22 This section of society has little to do
with him or his readers.
19 La Vie populaire, 14 August 1884.

20 Artinian, p. 1008 and p. 1009 (Pliade, I, p. 329 and p. 330).
21 Ibid, p. 1037 (p. 210).
22 Wolff describes the story as beautiful from beginning to end, beautiful in its general
conception, in its study of the characters, in its wholesome and powerful truth. The
article, originally published in Le Figaro, was reprinted by Le Voleur, along with the first
instalment of A Family Affair, in its issues of 1, 8 and 15 September 1882. It can now be
found in Pliade, I, p. 1343 (translation ours).
The use of types: subversion or immersion?

We have seen that the short story does not hesitate to use types social
if not traditional literary types in order to facilitate the readers rapid
entry into the story (see Chapter Four). Instead of being reworked, the type
is usually developed along expected lines. When Akutagawa, for instance,
describes the life of brigands in the Middle Ages in Cht (The Brigands),
he relies on all the readers preconceived ideas of what constitutes a
brigand.23 With little surprise but with all the power of the topos we
see the development of life outside the law, with its train of evil deeds
perpetrated with the greatest indifference, and encounters endured with
the greatest sangfroid. Similarly, Maupassants La Maison Tellier (Madame
Telliers Establishment) plays on the stereotype of the prostitute, while
Pirandellos Lumie di Sicilia (Sicilian Limetrees) builds for our pleasure an
antithesis between the immoral urban female singer, and the poor and
virtuous provincial musician in love with her.24
Rarely will a narrative short story bypass the opportunity offered by
exoticism of this kind, even when the author appears as the defender
of a type known to be ridiculous. From this point of view, Maupassants
Miss Harriet is a particularly interesting story, because critics have seen
in it the symbol of the authors compassion for his characters.25 As we
become aware of the many signs of distancing, such a conclusion becomes
surprising. From her first appearance, Miss Harriet is characterised as
having the face of a mummy; she is a sour herring adorned with curling
papers, a singular apparition which makes the narrator laugh.26 This
23 Akutagawa Rynosuke, Akutagawa Rynosuke zensh, 19 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten,
1954-1955), I, pp. 207-75.
24 Artinian, pp. 43-58 (Pliade, I, pp. 256-83); Luigi Pirandello, Il vecchio Dio (Milan:
Mondadori, 1979), pp. 133-44.
25 Artinian, pp. 328-41 (Pliade, I, pp. 876-95). In a letter to Maupassant, the editor Victor
Havard describes Miss Harriet as having accents of tenderness and of a supreme
emotion (quoted in Pliade, I, p. 1546, translation ours); Louis Forestier himself argues
that Maupassant shows in this story a sensibility and a sensuality that are not absent
from the rest of the works, but are here particularly visible (ibid, translation ours).
Denise Brahimi, in a book dedicated to the denunciation of the clichs of the criticism
on Maupassant, uses the word compassion dozens of times, for example: he sometimes
reveals without mask his infinite compassion. Denise Brahimi, Quelques ides reues sur
Maupassant (Paris: Editions LHarmattan, 2012), p. 62 (translation ours). Fusco (1994),
while not calling it empathy, feels nevertheless that Maupassant had sympathy for
his characters, even the Norman peasants (p. 27). But he puts to light the central role of
irony (especially pp. 17, 21, 67-70).
26 Artinian, p. 331 (Pliade, I, p. 880).
A Foreign World125
narrator, a strolling painter who collects sketches and favours from

the farm girls on his walks through Normandy, does not subscribe to the
peasants judgement of her as a demoniac. But he goes on to develop at
length what she truly is:
She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles, one of those
opinionated puritans of whom England produces so many, one of those good
and insupportable old women who haunt the tables dhte of every hotel in
Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of
the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias,
their petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor
of India rubber, which makes one believe that at night they slip themselves
into a case of that material. When I meet one of these people in a hotel I act
like birds which see a manikin in a field.27
This time the type is well documented: this particular kind of elderly lady,
typified by the English Old Maid, haunted the literature of the time,
just as she haunted the tourist hotels. True, Maupassant embellishes the
wornout topos: his narrator makes friends with her. But we should not
forget under what conditions: it is because she is so pitifully bizarre that
she interests him, and then she expresses her admiration for one of his
sketches.28 He never refrains from characterising her as ridiculous:
Wrapped up in her square shawl, inspired by the balmy air and with teeth
firmly set [] She now accepted these with the vacant smile of a mummy.
[] She was a caricature of ecstasy.
I turned my face away from her so as to be able to laugh.29
And this at the precise moment when he says that both of them are as
satisfied as any two persons could be who have just learned to understand
and penetrate each others motives and feelings.30 I do not see how the
narrators representation of a caricature permits talk of compassion,
or of a touching and emotional understanding of a being whom the rest
of society despised. He feels the same interest in her as he did in the
little bell which struck midday. The narrator admits that he felt for her
something besides curiosity which even makes him say: I wanted []
to learn what passes in the solitary souls of those wandering old English
27 Ibid, pp. 331-32 (emphases mine) (p. 881).

28 This woman appeared so singular that she did not displease me. Ibid, p. 332 (p. 881).
29 Ibid, p. 334 (p. 885). I take the liberty to modify Artinians translation, which reads It
would have been an ecstatic caricature. (Maupassant: la caricature de lextase).
30 Ibid. Note the two juxtaposed sentences: And we became firm friends immediately. /
She was a brave creature with an elastic sort of a soul [].
dames.31 However, that is what short story narrators never do. And when,
in the end, he meditates on the secrets of suffering and despair borne
by Miss Harriet, he still talks of her disagreeable and ridiculous body,
with the same mixture of pity and ridicule, as when he met her (Poor
solitary beings [] poor beings, ridiculous and lamentable) or when he
discovered that she loved him (feeling that I could just as soon weep as
laugh).32 Of course he wants to weep, and this is what strikes the critics
when they speak of compassion and understanding; but nevertheless he
still wants to laugh.33
We are prevented from seeing this distancing because this type is
considered to be obvious by both readers of the time and modern critics. It
clearly relies on the traditional image of the English spinster who evoked
in every late nineteenth century reader the same sentiments Maupassant
ascribed to his painter. The English Old Maid is thought to be laughable
and Miss Harriet will certainly not change our opinion. The story merely
succeeds in showing that it is possible to have pity, even within the heart of
ridicule.34
When pretending to rework a type, the classic short story will generally
be establishing another. Maupassant will provide us with a quick example.
In La Rempailleuse (A Strange Fancy), published in Gil Blas, the heroine is a
poor and elderly chair-mender.35 The narrator is a worldly Parisian doctor
who has retired to the provinces. To contribute to the inevitable, endless
31 Ibid, p. 333 (p. 883).
32 Ibid, pp. 335 and 337 (pp. 886 and 890).
33 Admittedly, the narrator calls himself, in the same sentence, ridiculous; but he only
describes in this way his behaviour as a philanderer who had not, for once, anticipated
his success, finding the adventure as both comic and deplorable, feeling ridiculous
and thinking her nearly crazy with unhappiness. He thinks his own departure should
take care of everything. In the meanwhile he continues to expound: that grotesque and
passionate attachment for me and finally these thoughts put [him] now in an excited
bodily state (ibid, p. 338): he will go on to kiss the servant.
34 The examples I have come across all show that short stories were more abrupt when
published in the press, and much of the violence of the short stories were softened before
publication in a collection. In the original version of Miss Harriet published in Le Gaulois
(9 July 1883), the caricature is more extreme. Firstly, it lacks the great description of
nature at the beginning that unites the principled fanatic and the painter. Secondly,
the definition of the activity of the strolling painter is much more trivial (studies of
servants and memorable nonsense). The adventure with Miss Harriet thus is in violent
contrast to the lesser loves which are the only background. Finally, the portrait of
the Englishwoman is much shorter: sour herring, she never spoke at table [] [but
read] a small book of some Protestant propaganda (the original version can be found in
Pliade, I, pp. 154652).
35 Artinian, pp. 651-55 (Pliade, I, pp. 54652).
A Foreign World127
after-dinner discussion of love and passion, he announces the story of a

love which lasted fifty years, and his audience of women of the provinces
good society immediately break into lyrical couplets about life-long love.36
When he tells them that the protagonists are the village pharmacist and
the chair-mender, however, the ladies now express violent disgust the
chair-mender is considered to be part of the dregs of society, even lower on
the social scale than peasants. When the narrator asserts forcefully that her
love is no more ridiculous than any other, we are ready to believe that he is
free from the prejudices usually expressed by the short story. However, his
characterisation of the girl is paroxistically pejorative: she is ragged, flearidden, sordid.37 She is also shown as being taken in by all the spectacles
of society exactly those that the Parisian readers of Gil Blas would not
be taken in by. She is enamoured by the pharmacists son who becomes
her idol and accepts repeatedly all her money and enchanted by the
pharmacy window, before which she stays charmed, aroused to ecstasy
by this glory of coloured water, this apotheosis of shining crystal.38
Yet the characters who are ultimately distanced in this story are
the narrow-minded women to whom the doctor tells the story. Gil Blas
published hundreds of stories about love told by similar narrators, and
the chair-menders love is shown to be no more ridiculous than that of
the provincial women. Readers are in agreement with the doctor in their
contempt for the silly, romantic notions seemingly found in every bourgeois
woman.
Deceptive representations of reality

Chekhov may very well have been the most subtle of all this periods short
story writers. Even his early satires are capable of complex representations,
and the stories of his later career extend the territory of the genre, creating
texts that break with some of the rules we have thus far seen at work;
perhaps more than any other author he paved the way to the modern
short story, with its new perspective on self and society. Chekhov is the
one author who really challenges the readers existing conceptions of
the world. Perhaps surprisingly, I would argue that this too is achieved
36 Ibid, p. 651 (p. 546).
37 Our translation from Pliade, I, p. 547 ([] haillonneuse, vermineuse, sordide). Artinians
translation is very tame: ragged and dirty (p. 652).
38 Artinian, pp. 652-53 (Pliade, I, p. 549).
through distancing. Chekhov takes full advantage of the short storys

laws and his difference from other writers is not in abandoning distance
but in putting at a distance all the positions he observes.
Vladimir Kataev has shown that the seeds of all Chekhovs work
are to be found in the early stories of discovery.39 In Chapter Two we
saw Chekhovs powerful use of antithesis in these stories, where the
simple and deluded concept of the world that his character entertained
was violently opposed to the new and rightful concept he came to have:
kazalos/okazalos (it seemed that/it appeared clearly that). What Kataev
makes apparent is that from then on, Chekhov continued to denunciate
his characters hallucinations (lozhnye predstavleniya, or more literally
deceptive representations) of the world.40 The phrase is Chekhovs, and is
used in a story that makes the technique particularly clear: Spat khochetsya
(Sleepy).41 The heroine is a young girl, Varka, who works as a servant in a
rich farmers house. She does all the normal household chores as well as
babysitting at night. The baby cries all the time so that she can never get to
sleep, and then at dawn she must begin a new days work. Overcome with
exhaustion, and in the grip of a semiconscious dream, she finally kills the
baby so that she can get some rest.
It is a powerful story, and one in which the reader had the opportunity
to be immersed in a world of which he or she was most likely ignorant. Our
pity for the girl is intense, and we feel vividly Chekhovs often discussed
interest in the plight of the poor. My point here is that this interest takes
advantage of the genres specific features. Varka, like nearly all Chekhovs
characters, is seen to be trapped by her false concept of the world; she
is incapable of judging her situation correctly, of understanding the real
(and social) causes of her exhaustion. This is why she identifies the baby
as the source of her misery and strangles it: the hallucination takes hold
of Varka.42 What is important is that Chekhov shows vividly both her
39 V. B. Kataev, Proza Chekhova: problemy interpretatsii (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo

universiteta, 1979). For a partial translation, see Vladimir Kataev, If Only We Could Know:
An Interpretation of Chekhov, trans. by Harvey Pitcher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), here
pp. 11-19; see also, pp. 53-55. Given that this translation is much abridged, I shall give
future references to the Russian edition.
40 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983), VII, p. 12 (hereafter Nauka).
41 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Anton Chekhovs Short Stories, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw, trans.
by Constance Garnett (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 64-69 (hereafter Matlaw). The
Russian text can be found in Nauka, pp. 7-12.
42 Ibid, p. 69 (p. 12)
A Foreign World129
misery and her inability to analyse the situation. Through the powerful
hypotyposis of the abuse and exploitation of the girl by her masters, he
makes sure that the reader, on the other hand, will not mistake the reason
for her suffering.
Throughout his career, Chekhov forcefully depicted his characters
objectively terrible situations moral or physical and at the same time
made it clear that the reason for their predicament lay in their inability to
understand correctly the world around them. This is an important point,
especially since western critics have generally insisted, to the contrary,
on Chekhovs so-called refusal to take a position in relation to political
problems. In his often-quoted declaration to Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov
said that one should not ask a writer for solutions to the problems of his
time.43 But there are two steps to Chekhovs declaration, as Kataev most
opportunely reminds us: You are right to demand from the artist a
conscious relationship with his work but you confuse two ideas: resolving
the question, and asking the correct question; only the latter is obligatory for
the artist (the emphasis is Chekhovs).44 Chekhov is in no way a relativist
for whom all positions would be equal. He refuses to give practical answers,
but thinks his responsibility as a writer is to ask the correct question. By
doing this, he occupies a position from which he can state what is correct
and what is not. In the terms we have been using, he occupies a position of
superiority to his characters, and his goal is to make his readers understand
correctly what is happening to them.
In Sleepy, the satire that is applied to everyone except the heroine is
quite blatant. Chekhovs later stories were more subtle, but the distancing
of certain characters only gained in strength. Kryzhovnik (Gooseberries),
written towards the end of Chekhovs life, relates the pitiful story of a
bureaucrat whose only dream is to grow gooseberries in a garden of his
own.45 The hero is denounced along lines that are now already familiar
to us: Chekhov draws a paroxystic portrait of the despicable traits of the
lower middle class. The hero wears himself out working all his life to obtain
money; for that purpose he marries a rich woman whom he does not love.
Sordid avarice (which deprives him and his wife of any degree of comfort),
the niggardliness of the dream (summarised by the pitiful and haunting
43 Suvorin was a major intellectual, and the director of the journal Novoe vremya. The letter,
dated 27 October 1888, is in Nauka, III, p. 46.
44 Kataev (1979), p. 40.
45 Matlaw, pp. 185-94 (Nauka, X, pp. 55-65).
image of the scarcely edible gooseberries), the ludicrous presumption and

vanity of someone who thinks he is a gentleman because he possesses a
shabby house, and the animal satisfaction of eating inedible gooseberries
the author does not spare his hero one iota. The conclusion of the story
takes the form of a judgement delivered by the narrator against the hero.
This is one of the most famous moments in Chekhovs work, always quoted
by Soviet critics who saw in this and a few other similar stories the proof
that the author was, at heart, ready for the advent of the Revolution:
There is no such thing as happiness, nor ought there to be, but if there is
any sense or purpose in life, this sense and purpose are to be found not in
our own happiness, but in something greater and more rational. Do good!46
In fact, as Kataev clearly shows, this is by no means a direct and personal

expression of Chekhovs real thoughts.47 It is that of a character, in this
case the narrator, who is in fact distanced and discredited by the frame
of the story.
Gooseberries is not presented on its own, but as part of what is
generally known as the little trilogy: three different stories told by three
companions.48 All the rhetorical techniques in these three stories contribute
to the discrediting of their heroes. But the framing provided by the trilogy
itself is used to distance each one of the narrators in turn. The characters
inside the stories are mocked by their objective presentation as well as by
the comments of the narrators, but the narrators themselves are also mocked
in the frame. For example, Ivan Ivanich, the narrator of Gooseberries, is
discredited by Chekhovs insistence that the story has bored its listeners,
but also by the fact that he is incapable of feeling natures beauty. This is
one of the techniques that Chekhov used to show a characters limitations
(his soul cannot feel it). The frame presents us with one of Chekhovs
famous descriptions of nature: the pure beauty of the river where the
characters are bathing in the rain is one of the moments deeply felt and
46 Ibid, p. 193 (p. 64).

47 Kataev (1979), pp. 23850.
48 See ibid, pp. 211-21. The little trilogy comprises The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and
About Love (1898). All three can be found in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Kiss and Other
Stories, trans. by Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). At the beginning of The
Man in a Case, we see two men, Burkin and Ivan Ivanich, who take to telling stories while
on a hunting trip together. Burkin tells the first story, while Ivan Ivanich follows with
Gooseberries. The third story is told the next day, when they have come to a landowner in
the district, who offers drinks and conversation after a bath in the river.
A Foreign World131
well remembered by generations of readers. But the character is shown to

be unable to perceive it.
All the characters in both the stories and the frame of the trilogy are
discredited because they hold to their truths: fragmented, inadequate
concepts of reality that prevent them from seeing the worlds complex
and contradictory facets and inherent natural beauty. Even when it is not
a question of pure material interest (as was the case of the rich farmers
of Sleepy), even when it is a truth that can be taken for capital-T truth
by generations of critics (as in the indictment against petty individual
happiness), Chekhov shows its insufficiency. He challenges the image of all
his characters, and also the prerevolutionary expressions in their mouths.
Refusing to believe in readymade truths refusing, of course, to give
readymade practical answers to the problems of his time Chekhov
fulfils in his stories what he feels is the true duty of the writer: showing all
the shortcomings, he denounces the falseness of his contemporaries values.
The great man

Distance does not necessarily imply a negative discreditation. It is just as
possible to imagine that it can, on the contrary, help to raise a character
to the status of a hero. Although there were many stories that did this
in the newspapers of the time, they are very rare in my corpus of classic
short stories by great authors. However, one extremely good example is
Mori gais Hanako.49 Published in a Japanese review, this short story is
essentially an homage to Auguste Rodin. The narrator is a young Japanese
student, Kubota, who relates an interview between the sculptor and his
fellow countrywoman, the dancer Hanako, for which he acted as interpreter.
In it we find reversed the same processes of distancing as in the stories
that show their heroes in an extremely negative light. For example, gai
emphasises the radical difference between Rodins concept of beauty and
that of the narrator and his readers. Kubota insists at length on the fact that
Hanako is only a variety dancer, with no particular beauty according to
the Japanese canon. Rodin, on the contrary, from the moment he enters the
studio, expresses his admiration for the young woman, and the end of the
49 Mori gai, Youth and Other Stories, ed. by J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 274-79. The Japanese text can be found in Mori gai, Mori gai
zensh, 38 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1971-1975), VII, pp. 189-97.
text consists of a translation of the sculptors remarks on Japanese beauty.50

Rodins vision is radically different from that of the typical Japanese reader
at the turn of the century, but his view is shown to be superior.
The aesthete gai gives his contemporaries a glimpse of the intellectual
world of the great man, and the account is merely a pretext for this
portrayal. In the same way that short stories about peasants and working
people accumulate the traits of their characters which make them other,
so gai reviews here the attributes which make the sculptor a different
person from us: his powers of concentration, his memory of forms, the
breadth of his reading, and his idea of a concept of beauty according to
each race. The character is as distant as Maupassants peasants, but for the
purpose of praising not dismissing him.
We are simply the case: James and abstract entities

In Jamess work, the distance is made and used slightly differently. A
whole section of Jamess stories are social dramas, in which the characters,
for once, belong to the same world as the readers. The distance here is born
of the very construction of the short story, which is another instance of
what Booth calls known error proclaimed: the text presents as real facts
that we know are false. The effect is, however, very different from what we
saw in Maupassants An Adventure in Paris. In The Great Good Place, James
shows an author devoured by worldly life social calls, reviews and
articles who suddenly finds himself saved; he wakes up one day in a
sort of sunny Thlme, a marvellous world in which there is nothing but
intellectual work.51 The fiction of this magical retreat is never denounced;
it simply gives this obvious unreality something of the strength of allegory.
In The Private Life, James again uses parallel universes to articulate
the status of the artist in society. He depicts a lord who literally has no
existence outside the presence of others, whose body and soul disappear
when he is alone. Parallel to this, he develops the idea that the artist only
has value through his work, and that the worldly life can only overwhelm
the true creator. In order to demonstrate this fact, he gives a writer, Clare
50 We know that Hanako was a model much loved by Rodin. These remarks were
published by a Parisian journal from which gai made his translation. The story itself
was published in July 1910, a few months before the special issue, dedicated to Rodin, of
the great journal Shirakaba (December 1910).
51 Edel, XI, pp. 13-42.
A Foreign World133
Vawdrey, two bodies. One inhabits the salons, dines and gossips in town;
the other remains cloistered in his room, writing his celebrated novels.
The casual way in which James unites both proofs in one text is part of
his particular tone: he masters better than anyone the constraints and
resources of the short story format, and will often make of it quasi-abstract
narratives, playing with the structural traits paroxysms and distancing
that are the rule in the genre at that time. As one of his characters state
of themselves, they represent only the abstract law of the narrative: Were
simply the case [] of having been had enough of.52
Another example of Jamess characters as cases can be found in Fordham
Castle, a story from the final phase of his career.53 The narrator, Abel F. Taker,
is an unpolished American whose wife has sent him to Switzerland, and
told him to pretend to be dead, while she attempts to conquer Londons
social scene. James is not content to insist amusingly on the literalness of
Takers wifes command.54 He brings Taker face to face with an American
woman whose daughter has also sent her into exile so that she can work
on her ascendancy of the social ladder without being embarrassed by the
presence of her provincial mother. Those of us who have read enough short
stories of James will suspect very quickly that the two aspirational women
will also find themselves in the same site of worldly success: Fordham
Castle, an estate belonging to English gentry, to which each has succeeded
in getting an invitation once they have unloaded their unwanted relation.
They even become friends, like the two exiles. James then heaps on the
coincidences, and emphasises the incredible aspect of his stage-setting. It
is surprising to think that this is the same author who led us through the
wanderings of Kate Croys thoughts in Wings of the Dove. James does not try
to bring us close to the heroes of his short stories. He develops a narrative
line that supposes, on the contrary, absolute detachment on our part, even
if this detachment is accompanied by real pleasure in watching the heros
progress.
52 In Broken Wings, two artists love each other at a distance and do not dare admit their love,
each being (falsely) convinced that the other is enormously successful, and so could not
be interested in him/her. The hero thus defines their adventure as the incarnation of a
law that they only illustrate. Edel, XI, pp. 217-38 (p. 232).
53 Edel, IX, pp. 125-49.
54 The narrator repeats that he is not allowed to use his name, and that he is ready to die if
that would help his wife in her career, etc.
Reading at face value: the double distance

To conclude and prepare the way to our next chapter on dialect, I will turn to
an apparent counter-example Maupassants Boitelle, one of the extremely
rare stories that were published in the penny papers that presented lower
class readers with an image of themselves in order to understand how
these readers might have responded to seeing themselves distanced in
this way. To my mind, the short story as a genre works in the same way as
an ironic text. As with irony, the author can choose never to make explicit
how we are to interpret the text never to signal what he is doing through
straightforward warnings in the authors own voice.55 The author can
use the characters own words and values to discredit them, without ever
saying that they are ridiculous. It is then possible for the readers not to see
the indirect indications scattered through the story and therefore to read it
at face value. In irony, the result is well known: we are returned to the hell
of bad readers, we do not experience the euphoria of values shared with
the author.56 In the short story, the essential result is that, for once, these
stories can be read by the very people they represent. What interests me
here is that, in the cases I know of, another a second distance is present
in the text, which serves to make it exotic to these unexpected readers.
Boitelle was republished by the Supplment du Petit Parisien, a popular and
very inexpensive newspaper, and a number of other cheap newspapers.57
When first published in the society paper LEcho de Paris, it functioned
exactly as all the stories we have seen. Boitelle is a young peasant, who
falls in love with a black servant-girl while fulfilling his military service in
the large town of Le Havre. The storys zest is in the description of his vain
efforts to get his parents to accept her as their daughter-in-law. The elderly
peasants express their anxiety in phrases that must have seemed droll
to the society readers: shes too black, says the mother; before asking
silly questions, from It doesnt soil linen more than other skins?, to Are
there more black people besides her in her country?. The hero himself
is distanced from the society reader by all the usual devices: Boitelle is
presented as a night cartman (he cleans the drains and cesspools), as
naive as his parents. When waiting for his sweetheart, his attention is
divided between the girl and the parrots of a shop nearby, and for him she
55 Booth (1974), pp. 53-56.
56 Ibid, pp. 73-89.
57 Artinian, pp. 112126 (Pliade, II, pp. 1086-94).
A Foreign World135
is just as exotic as the birds: he really could not tell which of these two
beings he contemplated with the greater astonishment and delight.58
But in this story, Maupassant relies completely on his readers capacity
to perceive the implied ridicule of his characters: he never explicitly states
that the parents are silly or the girl has bad taste, he simply gives examples
that his readers will recognise. Echo de Paris readers were not at risk of
being in the hell of bad readers: they were accustomed to these types of
subjects and jokes. But lower class readers could ignore their own distancing,
which is only indirect, and be interested in the second exotic spectacle, that
of the girl. The African woman was the epitome of the exotic subject at the
time, and Maupassant depicts this girl departing for her parents village:
She had put on, for this journey to the house of her lovers parents, her
most beautiful and most gaudy clothes, in which yellow, red and blue
were the prevailing colors, so that she had the appearance of one adorned
for a national fete.59 Against this background, the tragedy of the lovers
fate can expand and interest the readers, as would one of the serials in
the newspaper which often play on the same subject of virtuous and
unfortunate love. The parents refusal of the marriage is, for a respectful
son, a condemnation of fate: the lovers can only weep, and the readers with
them.60
Given the examples in this chapter, I cannot share Richard Fuscos
judgement of the relationship between reader and author in Maupassants
short stories. He does not deny the distance that occurs between the two
groups.61 However, for him, as for many critics, distance in the short
story is equally distributed to everyone. The main effect of this would be
to distance the readers themselves from their own prejudices. For Fusco,
58 Ibid, p. 1122 (p. 1087).

59 Ibid, p. 1123 (p. 1088).
60 A somewhat similar case is that of Simone de Beauvoirs La Femme rompue, in which
the distancing of the heroine is very strong, but the irony is never made explicit. To
Beauvoirs dismay, the readers of the popular womens magazine Elle felt sympathy
for the girl, not paying attention to the strong condemnation of her petty bourgeois
conception of love a constant target of Beauvoir here as elsewhere. The condemning is
that of a woman who has allowed herself to be removed from the world of productive
work, of earning power and independent self-definition. Ray Davison, Simone de
Beauvoir: La Femme rompue, in Short French Fiction: Essays on the Short Story in France
in the Twentieth Century, ed. by J. E. Flower (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp.
71-88 (pp. 79 and 77).
61 See the already quoted: To the cosmopolitan Parisian [ie Maupassant], the Norman
peasant and world probably appeared as a distant and alien being and place. Fusco
(1994), p. 16.
the essential point would be in the battle the author is leading against
the reader, in the attack he would launch and then escalate, inducing
the reader to self-doubt in his intellectual confidence.62 In the surpriseinversion stories, for example, by revealing at the end that the reader
has misconstructed the tale, he would reveal to the reader his or her own
prejudices.
However, compared to the attacks on the foreign and strange characters
that occur in these stories, this attack seems to me to be quite mild; the
stereotype is confirmed rather than truly undermined.63 Indeed, in 1945, the
Writers War Board issued a pamphlet entitled How Writers Perpetuate
Stereotypes that ranked the short story even below radio, comics and
advertising as the medium that is the most heinous of race offenders.64
To my mind, the crucial point is to consider these stories in the place where
they appeared: the society newspapers. If we look at all the other articles,
reports and advertisements that appeared alongside the short stories, it is
clear that these papers were not prone to question the existing values of the
readers, but rather to affirm them. That is not to say that a transformation
of sorts does not take place: to take again the example of the surpriseinversion stories, the readers of Maupassant in Gil Blas or Le Gaulois
relished the pleasure of discovering a new, unexpected way of rearranging
the narrative elements so that their meaning would change dramatically.
Fusco insightfully compares this to the pleasure of the Sherlock Homes
stories.65 The baffled reader and Watson himself are certainly in awe of
Holmess genius. However, this does not mean they fustigate themselves
for not seeing what the great mind, against all odds, has been able to see.
62 Ibid, pp. 22-23, 29, 30, 33 and 34.

63 With the important exception of fantastic stories and stories of madness, which we have
seen and will see again to be historically, at the end of nineteenth century, the place
of the disintegration of the self-assured, positivist self.
64 Mullen (1997), p. 25.
65 Fusco (1994), p. 34.
9. Dialogue and Character

Discreditation
It is clearly not part of Conrads purpose to confer

language on the rudimentary souls of Africa. In place
of speech they made a violent babble of uncouth sounds.
They exchanged short grunting phrases even among
themselves. At first sight these instances [of quoting the
characters] might be mistaken for unexpected acts of
generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some
of his best assaults.1
So far we have looked at some of the most common techniques that create
a sense of distance between reader and character in the short story. There
are, however, two devices that are rather more subtle and deserve a longer
look. In this chapter we shall analyse the first of these: what happens when
the story makes room for the characters actual words. Then, in the
next chapter, we will pause to look at the interaction among the various
participants in the narrative process: author, narrator, reader and character.
The short story is at its most exquisitely subtle and complex in both of these
cases. The result, however, is once again the distancing and discrediting
of a character, even though these techniques are usually thought to have
the automatic effect of creating a sense of intimacy with the reader.
The analysis of speech is of crucial importance to us, because any
discussion of it is intimately bound up with the problem of polyphony.
By making room for his characters words, by retiring from the scene in
order to let them speak, the author, in fact, reveals his concept of them;
1
Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday 1989),
pp. 8-9.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.9
the degree of validity of the speech permitted them will be a touchstone

for their status in the story. But before analysing the short stories in our
corpus to see how these techniques are used, we shall first take a look at the
criticism surrounding them, especially since one of our authors, Giovanni
Verga, has been at the centre of a rich and complex discussion in Italy.
More often than not critics agree, a priori and without discussion, that the
use of direct speech provides proximity to the character.2 This systematic
belief, however, is often undermined by the theorists themselves when
they take time to analyse the contexts in which direct speech occurs: we
shall see that they then often come to reverse their previous assertions.
When critics as far apart as Luigi Russo and Valentin Voloshinov approach
the issue of direct speech, they do so in a remarkably similar fashion: their
first assertions are to say that quoting someones own terms, reproducing
not only the what? of a discourse but also the how? is a guarantee
of immediacy (in the case of Russo), or of tolerance [] a positive and
intuitive understanding of all the individual linguistic nuances of thought
(in the case of Voloshinov).3 To use Chinua Achebes words in this chapters
epigraph, this corresponds, in their mind, to an act of generosity, of
letting a foreign character express himself in his own words.
Reported discourse, on the contrary, for Voloshinov is the sign of a
rational, reductive understanding: the characters thoughts are filtered
through the narrator. This, for both Voloshinov and Russo, means that the
author refuses to make room for the characters own idiosyncrasies, that
he digests his characters being and allows it no expression of its own.
Reported speech is reduction, where direct speech indicates freedom and
respect for the character. The two critics thus adhere to what seems to be
2
Even Helmut Bonheim, who is known for questioning the readers immediate feelings,
argues that Direct speech suggests the closest possible nexus between character and
reader, as the term direct suggests. Indirect and reported speech by contrast blur the
impression and distance us from the character. Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes:
Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), p. 52. We all know, however,
that repeating someones words and intonations is a classic device of satire. According
to Bakhtin, this is even the essence of parody, which can expose to destroy. Mikhail
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl
Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 364.
3
Luigi Russo, Giovanni Verga (Bari: Laterza, 1941); and V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language, trans. by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language has been
attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin, although I am going to follow Emerson and Morsons
belief that it is indeed by Voloshinov. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail
Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Dialogue and Character Discreditation139
the credo of criticism since the nineteenth century, from Verga himself to
twentieth-century critics such as Helmut Bonheim and Grard Genette:4
the use of direct speech would indicate being with the character.
What is interesting in Voloshinov and Russo is that, when they submit
this abstract statement to textual proof, both end up renouncing it.
Voloshinov, for example, very quickly tempers the abstract proclamation
that tolerance is inherent in direct speech. He recognises at once that
quoting the characters own words is essentially a question of coloration,
of something picturesque: this is very different from the theory of giving
the character his own space through all the linguistic nuances of his
thought. He then states something which is a truism, although generally
not recognised: The authorial context [] is so constructed that the traits
the author used to define a character cast heavy shadows on his directly
reported speech.5
The image of the character that has already been built conditions our
perception of his words, giving us in advance his essential tone. Voloshinov
describes it as being of the same order as the make-up and costume of a
comic actor we are prepared to laugh before he even opens his mouth.
Direct speech provides the characters words but at the same time the
authors own nuances are added: irony, humour, etc.6 This challenges
Voloshinovs initial idea about the direct relationship between mimesis
of conversation and immediacy. By the end of his work, Voloshinov
swings to a diametrically opposite position from where he began. Talking
of Pushkin, he shows that it is only in reported discourse that it is possible
to achieve immediacy:
Such a substitution [of the author speaking for the character] presupposes
a parallelism of intonation, the intonations of the authors speech and the
substituted speech of the hero (what he might or should have said), both
running in the same direction.7
4
Verga expresses the theory of impersonality in Gramignas Mistress; the author must
efface himself, and leave the reader face to face with the bare fact, with the characters
who express themselves in their own terms. Giovanni Verga, The She-Wolf and Other
Stories, trans. by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp.
86-88. See also Bonheim (1986) and Grard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp.
189-93.
5
Voloshinov (1973), p. 134 (emphasis mine).
6
Ibid, p. 133.
7
Ibid, p. 138 (emphasis Voloshinovs).
In other words, it is the reported discourse that is with the character;

critical distance or judgement is best obtained by using the characters
actual words. Voloshinov is even clearer on this when he writes about
Jean de La Bruyre: He invested quasi-direct discourse with his animosity
toward [the characters] [] He recoils from the creatures he depicts.8 And
later: All of La Bruyres figures come out ironically refracted through
the medium of his mock objectivism.9 We are far from the initial validation
of tolerance, and much nearer to Achebes vision of the characters
language as an assault on him. Interestingly, Russo, who also changes
his opinion on direct speech, sees this as a matter of genre. As we shall see,
this is the case of a rift not so much between two techniques (direct speech
and reported speech), but between two ways of using speech: in the best
novels, direct speech creates immediacy, while in short stories, it results in
distancing the character.
Direct and indirect speech: Vergas novel versus short

stories
To get a clearer view, we can turn to Verga, whose work has always been at
the heart of Italian discussions of direct speech. For Italians critics, Vergas
stature is almost the equal of Alessandro Manzonis because he represented
the absolute success of the use of free indirect speech and dialect.10 He
portrayed the life of peasants in the then newly-created Kingdom of Italy
with a unique warmth using what some critics have called regression.11
In many of his works, particularly in his great novel, I Malavoglia (The House
by the Medlar Tree), the point of view of the author regresses to one of his
characters: even the narration is both from the point of view and in the style
of the peasants introduced in the scene.12
8
Ibid, p. 151.
9
Ibid (emphasis mine).
10 By dialect I mean all speech that reproduces distortions of the language that denote
the social or geographic origin of the character. Vergas work on dialect represents an
original contribution, in tune with the work of the folklorists of his time, always stressed
by critics. See for example Giuseppe Lo Castro, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Saggi
brevi di letteratura antica e moderna, 5 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001), p. 5, pp.
45-56 and 49-70.
11 See Guido Baldi, LArtificio della regressione. Tecnica narrativa e ideologia nel Verga verista
(Naples: Liguori, 1980).
12 Giovanni Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1983). The novel describes the efforts of the Malavoglias, an essentially honest and
Russo was fundamental in establishing this idea of Vergas greatness.13

At first Russo claimed that the author, through his constant use of regression
and direct speech, always achieves an immediacy with his characters: he
enters into their existence and creates an empathy with their world view,
both in his short stories and The House by the Medlar Tree.14 However, when
Russo begins to examine the style of the texts, only the novel retains its claim
to such an affirmation. All the short stories, after close analysis, reveal, to
the contrary, a radical distancing, and Verga is even described by Russo as
an artista di ferocia.15 Russos intention was to trace an historical evolution
in Verga: The House by the Medlar Tree together with the collection of short
stories, Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields), represented the height of his work,
after which he was seen as reverting to a more distant and decadent style.
In fact, although he does not observe this explicitly, Russo was essentially
distinguishing between the form of the novel and the short story.16 It will
not then come as a surprise to us, after what we have seen in the last
poor family, to raise themselves above their social station as very unimportant sailors in
the Sicilian town of Aci Trezza. Verga reproduced the point of view of peasants in not
only his style but also his focus. The classic example is that, in the novel, the Battle of
Licodia has no more importance than the appearance of rats in the garden of one of the
busybodies.
13 There are three different versions of Russos Giovanni Verga: 1919, 1934, 1941; all
references here are to Luigi Russo, Giovanni Verga (Bari: Laterza, 1976), unless otherwise
stated.
14 Leo Spitzer also gives proof of this in LOriginalit della Narrazione nei Malavoglia,
Belfagor, 11 (1956), 37-53.
15 Russo (1976), p. 206. In his 1919 edition, it is only in the collection Vita dei campi (Life in
the Fields) that Russo identifies as having this miracle of entering in the characters
logic. In the course of this analysis he eliminated the Milanese stories (Per le vie) and
those belonging to Little Novels of Sicily, which reveal an author more distant from
his characters (p. 180, translation ours). In 1941, Russo added eighty pages of truly
stylistic analyses on the problem of this regression. These analyses, which are much
more precise than in the earlier edition, agree on everything except one point: the
few stories he had cited as the very example of immediacy no longer withstand such
an examination they are seen now as revealing an irreducible distance from the
characters. We find the same dynamics at work in criticism on Luigi Pirandello. Renato
Barilli argues that Pirandellos perspective is one of compassion. But, when analysing
them, he finally establishes a hierarchy among his various short stories, from satires that
cultivate distance to the few texts that, in the course of his analyses, are still considered
to have a true attitude of compassion and of immediacy. Several of these texts are not
classic short stories to my mind, but already what I would classify as modern stories.
See Renato Barilli, La Barriera del Naturalismo (Milan: Mursia, 1964).
16 In his speech in praise of Verga on 2 September 1920, Pirandello also finally recognised
that only in The House by the Medlar Tree does Verga achieve the goal of immediacy which
he had set for himself in Gramignas Mistress. Luigi Pirandello, Opere di Luigi Pirandello
(Milan: Mondadori, 1956-60), available at http://lafrusta.homestead.com/riv_pirandello.
html (accessed 22/10/13).
chapter, that Russo finally emphasised the very intimate interrelationship

that Vergas short stories establish between animals and men (particularly
in Jeli il Pastore [The Shepherd]). These primitive men, once again, are
shown as closer to animals than to the rest of society.17 While his novel
offers nuanced characterisation, Vergas intimate portrait of peasants in
his short stories largely rests on stereotypes.
After Russo, a series of important Marxist critics further helped to create
the colossal stature of il caso Verga in Italy. Unlike most critics, they
saw Verga as a wonderful example of critical-cognitive realism, and they
were the ones to bring to light the distancing of his characters in his short
stories.18 Their starting point was diametrically opposed to Russo: they saw
this distancing in all of Vergas texts, both novels and short stories. But
Donato Margarito is forced to recognise that in The House by the Medlar Tree
the distance does not exist: the heroes are shown to be making disastrous
choices, while at the same time holding sympathetic values.19 Their point
of view can be challenged, and the novel does indeed show the failure of
their endeavours and that this failure is a result of contradictions in their
value system but it is a discussion that allows them to have a full voice
of their own. Their values cannot be refuted in totality, as is the case with
17 This, moreover, did not bother Russo who acknowledged the primitivism in Verga,
which he saw as a good antidote to the modern world. However, this is only true in the
short stories. Russo plays with the two scenarios: on the one hand, he praises the absence
of distance in Verga, providing examples, in fact, only from The House by the Medlar Tree.
On the other hand, taking his examples from the short stories, he salutes the return to
the primitive. A cursory reading of his book could ignore that this primitivism is, in
fact, accompanied by a distance.
18 See Romano Luperini, Verga e le strutture narrative del realismo: saggio su Rosso Malpelo
(Padova: Liviana, 1976); and Donato Margarito, Verga nella critica marxista: dal caso
critico al metodo critico-negativo, in Verga: lideologia, le strutture narrative, il caso critico,
ed. by Carlo Augieri and R. Luperini (Lecce: Millela, 1982), pp. 235-89. Baldi (1980) gives
a superb example in Rosso Malpelo, where he shows the clash between reality and how
it is actually represented. Rosso is a poor miner, crushed by his work and hated because
he is red-haired and therefore bad. The author denounces the social and economic
order of this inhuman society by having the narrator and characters justify it, and then
distancing us from their views.
19 The value system of the Malavoglia, from wisdom to love, is worthy to be considered
at a certain narrative level, and acquires a tangible materiality, something noted by both
peasant and intellectual commentators, sometimes very sympathetically; Margarito
(1982), p. 273, translation ours. See also Vittorio Lugli, Lo stile indiretto libero in Flaubert
e in Verga, in Dante e Balzac con altri italiani e francesi (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche
Italiane, 1952), p. 221-238. For a more complete presentation of this discussion, see
Florence Goyet, La Nouvelle au tournant du sicle en France, Italie, Japon, Russie, pays anglosaxons. Maupassant, Verga, Mori gai, Akutagawa Rynosuke, Tchekhov et James (doctoral
thesis, Universit Paris 4-Sorbonne, 1990), pp. 438-45.
the characters of his short stories for example, the miners and mineowners in Rosso Malpelo, who proclaim that the world of the mine is good.
The polyphony of the novel is untenable in the short story.20
In passing, we can recognise here one of the criteria necessary for
immediacy through direct speech. As Russo and Leo Spitzer have well
demonstrated, for immediacy to be possible there has to be a total absence
of external intervention. And total must be taken literally: this is far
from the impersonality of, say, Gustave Flaubert, whose most objective
passages are shaped by the authors value judgements. In fact, from the
moment we allow the possibility of interpreting the characters words
other than by the meaning and status he himself gives them, then we fall
into irony.21 However Russo, like Baldi, shows that this is a necessary but
not sufficient condition. Rosso Malpelo employs the same technique as The
House by the Medlar Tree; for all that, no one doubts that the worldview
presented in it must be rejected. Direct speech is neither an automatic
guarantee of immediacy, nor an infallible means of assuring distance, as
Margarito would have it. The rhetorical technique in itself is neutral, and
its use within a given strategy is what gives it meaning.
Dialect and distancing

The short story uses direct speech in order to energise the poles that it almost
always establishes. Maupassants Le Rveillon (An Odd Feast) illustrates
Voloshinovs point that the objective characterisation of the protagonist
prepares our reception of direct speech. The least one can say is that direct
speech in this story is not produced in a void: the protagonists are strongly
characterised before we hear their voices.22 The whole narrative centres on
20 It is striking to see, in all the discussion of The House by the Medlar Tree, to what extent the
greatest critics are in opposition over actual linguistic analysis. This begins with Spitzer
(1956), who critiques the grammatical analysis of Giacomo Devoto in Itinerario stilistico
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1975). Then Baldi (1980) refutes Spitzer, and Luperini (1976) is
of yet another opinion. It seems to me that the error is in wanting at all cost to oppose
diametrically what reverts to such and such a character or group of characters. In this
novel, the different voices and values match, merge, and encroach on each other. This
marks the difference between it and the short stories in which, to the contrary, things are
very clear.
21 Because they are skewed by clashes of style as described by Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric
of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 67-72.
Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 1265-68 (hereafter Artinian).
The French text can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis
the fact that the peasants depicted in the story come from the opposite end
of society from the narrator a country squire from Normandy and his
cousin with whom he goes hunting.
An Odd Feast is set on a horribly freezing Christmas eve, when the
hunters come upon a mass and then go visiting the family of a recently
deceased shepherd. The peasants shiver devotedly as they perform their
naive and silly rituals. The sight of the people at midnight mass strikes the
hunters as unbearably pointless. In the end they prefer to leave the shelter
of the church and walk around in the cold night until they decide to visit
the grandson of the dead man. While the shepherds family will be seen
huddling around a midnight feast of blood sausage, the hunters reminisce
at length on the delights of past Christmas dinners in a friendly expansive
mood which suddenly makes them feel very close to each other; they are
delighted with the cold weather even though it transforms the peasants
house into a Siberian hut because it ensures that there will be ducks on
the pond the next day.
The peasants words are presented within this framework; their speech is only
one of the characteristic traits that emerge for the reader out of the entire picture.
It both energises and seals the opposition between the sophisticated hunters
and the simple peasants, and establishes the essential fact that the peasants
belong to a universe with what are perceived to be strange and inferior values.
The first exchange indicates a difference in the class of education between the
peasants and the hunters as the peasants sit around a table made of a grain bin:
Well, Anthime, so your grandfather is dead? Oh Ay sir, he be passed on. In
response to the narrators request to see the body, Anthime answers: What good
would it do ee?. Then, when the gentlemen insist, the wife explains: I told ee I
put im in the bin till morning coz there baint no other place.23 Reproducing this
stilted dialect is a sure way for Maupassant to reinforce the surprise effect of the
revelation that the corpse of the old man is in the very grain bin on which they
have been eating. But it is more than that. It is a way of associating intimately the
behaviour of these characters with their specificity as peasants. The unaffected
way in which the woman makes the statement interrupting her husband,
and not seeing any harm in her action is as important as the dialect itself.
Admittedly, the peasants are bothered that they have been forced to admit what
they have done, but in fact they see their action as quite natural:
Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), II, pp. 336-41 (hereafter
Pliade).
23 Artinian, p. 1267 (Pliade, I, p. 341).

it be like this, sir. There be only one bed and we be only three, we slept
together Since he be poorly, we be sleeping on ground. The floor be awful
hard and cold now so when ee passed on, we told us since he be dead, he
dont feel nothing, so aint no use leavin him in bed. Ee be comfortable in
bin and we be gwain sleep in bed tonight, coz it be awful cold. I baint
gwain sleep with a dead man now, be I?24
The narrators first reaction is to laugh, a laugh very common in such

stories, which again plays on the difference between the civilized city
dwellers and the uneducated peasants. His reaction echoes, perhaps, that
of contemporary readers, and the well-to-do readers of Gil Blas, the journal
in which the story was first published. We are not shocked: there is an
assumption that we will accept quite readily the peasants reasons, but we
laugh at them because they are so far removed from our world and our
behaviours.
It is hard to maintain, as critics generally do in such cases, that
Maupassant is criticising the values of his own circle (and that of his
readers); that the implication of these stories is subversive. In An Odd Feast,
as usual, the peasants are marked by the seal of animalistic brutishness.25
We certainly find the wealthy cousins fury to be ridiculous, and see him as
a prisoner of his own values, incapable of recognising that there is no other
solution for the peasants. However, this judgement is accompanied by a
burst of laughter, because it has been made clear from the beginning of the
text, through Maupassants vivid descriptions, that the two worlds have
nothing in common.26 As a result, these characters are confined to their
24 Ibid. The text was translated at the beginning of the century in plain English, losing the
effect of dialect in the French original: You see, my good gentlemen, its just this way.
We have but one bed, and being only three we slept together; but since hes been so sick
we slept on the floor. The floor is awful hard and cold these days, my good gentlemen,
so when he died this afternoon we said to ourselves: As long as he is dead he doesnt
feel anything and whats the use of leaving him in bed? Hell be just as comfortable
in the bin. We cant sleep with a dead man, my good gentlemen! now can we?.
Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant: Ten Volumes in One,
trans. by Howard Dunne (New York: P. F. Collier, 1903), p. 972. This 1903 edition by
Dunne is generally thought of as very questionable; see Richard Fusco, Maupassant and
the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 119.
25 a gloomy and brutish expression on their faces [] [they would] munch in silence;
Between the two was a single plate of the pudding; a suffocating odor of roasted blood
pudding pervaded every corner of the room. Artinian, p. 1267.
26 Consider the various and always pejorative mentions of blood sausage, a common
peasant food, for example, when they lift the lid to reveal the corpse (And, removing
the dish of blood sausage, she lifted the table top). The blood sausage is a symbol of
their existence as peasants to the socialites: their feast stinks.
existence as peasants by their dialect. We are not facing the spectacle of

people akin to us, whom misery has driven to strange behaviour. They are
peasants, heavily defined as such, surrounded by circumstances that have
made them radically different from us. Their misery, their piety, their
smoke-filled room, tarnished with dirt and their feast of blood sausage,
make them and their world finally different in essence from the readers of
Gil Blas.
Built on the same principles, Chekhovs short story Muzhiki (Peasants)
roused very violent opposition.27 In a Russia where the slogan Khozhdenie
k narodu (Going to the people), launched in the 1860s by the Russian
Populists (the Narodniki), was still quite popular, Chekhov was thought to be
defending urbanites against peasants.28 This was not, however, at all what
he intended, and it is interesting to consider how an author of Chekhovs
ability could have been so misunderstood.29 The misunderstanding seems
to have resulted from the very characteristics of the short story format. The
still important presence of the Narodniks idea of back to the land acted
as a backdrop that, for once, enabled readers to be sensitive to the coldness
with which the short story treats its subjects.
Peasants tells the story of Nikolay, a mujik who at a young age went to
Moscow where he became a valet in one of the most elegant hotels in the
city. Old, sick, and penniless, he returns to his village where he hopes to
find peace and comfort. With this as his starting-point, Chekhov draws a
pitiless picture of the life of the peasants. The use of dialect is central: as in
Maupassant, it summarises and condenses a vision of the world and firmly
anchors the characters behaviours in their social class. The beginning of
the short story is full of paroxystic descriptions of misery and dirt. The old
mujik, softened by his years in the luxurious hotel, is shocked by the poverty
of his old house: there are flies, a broken stove, and walls decorated with
27 Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov, ed. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977), pp. 312-53 (hereafter Yarmolinsky). The Russian text can be found in
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983), IX, pp. 281-312 (hereafter Nauka).
28 In the 1860s, for an important group of intellectuals, the people represented the true
Holy Russia. Chekhov and his generation (those of the 1880s) had a conscious reaction
against this mythical vision of the profound Russia.
29 In order to show that the city was not a panacea for him, Chekhov published, in the
same collection as Peasants, Tri goda (Three Years), a portrayal of urban misery. He also
planned a sequel to the story, in which the heroines when they arrive in Moscow, would
experience the misery in the capital; but this sequel remained only an outline and was
never published (see outline in Nauka, IX, p. 344; there is no English translation that I
know of).
bottle labels rather than pictures. At the end of the first page, Nikolays
daughter calls to the cat. A little peasant girl of eight perched on the
stove and totally indifferent to their arrival alerts her in terms that are
roughly equivalent to:
It cant hear, said the little girl; its gone deaf.
Why?
Oh, it was hit.
Nikolay and Olga realized at first glance what life was like here.30
The conclusion is obvious: it is a different world, an atrocious and hopeless

place of misery, in which nothing can disturb a young girls apathy, neither
her cousins arrival, nor a maimed cat. Similarly, when the urbanites ask
their sister-in-law whether she is suffering from her soldier husbands
absence, she answers by a single exclamation of annoyance: Deuce take
him!.31 The language locks the character; it is the character. For once,
the Russian readers were sensitive to this like Dubliners in the height
of Gaelic Renaissance euphoria may have been because the idea of
superiority of peasant life and values was still vivid in Russia.
Foreign terms
The use of foreign terms in short stories, although different from dialect,
plays a similar role. By evoking regional or social distortions, or by
including a word in Italian in a short story set in Italy, the scene being
portrayed is given a voice. Henry James often uses this device, especially
in his early short stories about Europe. One passage in particular from
Thodolinde allows us to see the implications of foreign quotations.32 The
30 Yarmolinsky, p. 311. It is very difficult to translate into English the particular peasant
tone, because it does not consist, as in Maupassant, of incorrect phrases and phonetic
distortions. It is completely characteristic, but comes about essentially through the use
of parataxis and a singsong rhythm, a sort of chant which goes naturally with proverbs:
Ona u nas ne slishit, skazala devochka. Oglokhla. / Otchego? Tak. Pobili (Nauka, IX, p.
281).
31 Yarmolinsky, p. 317. The Russian is A nu ego!. The surprise which her answer provokes
(she does not miss her husband, she is quite happy that he is away) is intimately
associated with the actual expression, and solidifies the idea that these people neither
speak nor think like we do.
32 Edel, IV, pp. 141-207. Thodolinde had several US and UK variants, and was also published
under the title Rose-Agathe. These textual variants can be found in Henry James, The
Tales of Henry James: Volume 3, 1875-1879, ed. by Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), pp. 396-97.
story is about an American who has been living for some time in Paris. He
is sitting at his window waiting for a fellow expat to arrive:
A Parisian thoroughfare is always an entertaining spectacle, and I had still
much of a strangers alertness of attention [] There was poetry in the warm,
succulent exhalations of the opposite restaurant, where, among the lighted
lamps, I could see [...] the waiters in their snowy aprons standing in the
various attitudes of immanent empressement, the agreeable dame de comptoir
sitting idle [...] there was of course something very agreeable in the faint
upward gusts of the establishment in my rez-de-chausse [...] like a Madonna
who should have been coiffe in the Rue de la Paix.33
Doubtless austere Boston readers were not familiar with the institution of
the Parisian dame de comptoir, enthroned at her cash register in the majesty
of officiating over the supreme pleasures of absinthe and roast chicken.
However, women went to hairdressers in America in Jamess day, and first
floors existed in Boston James even used two different words to indicate
them, according to his public, for an American reader first floor and for the
English reader ground floor.34
The point, of course, is that the French words make it Parisian. They gave
the American or English reader the titillation of memory or imagination
that made the scene more than an abstract evocation. Empressement is
purely for the pleasure of recalling Paris, and disorientating his reader.35
It is important once again to note that all of this presupposes not only a
linguistic competence in the reader, but also a prior acquaintance with
the foreign culture. Someone who does not know the meaning of dame de
comptoir will not learn it here. The interest is elsewhere: not in making a
foreign country familiar, but in recalling it in its concrete form. These terms
create foreign pockets within the text, exotic morsels. They add greatly to
local colour but nothing to knowledge.
The foreign quotes in Mori gais Hanako jump out at us, since they
appear at a ninety-degree angle in the Japanese text (see fig. 1).36
33 Edel, IV, pp. 119-20.

34 For more on Jamess changes in vocabulary to suit an English audience, see Michael
Anesko, Friction with the Market: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 59-60. These amendments were a necessary condition
for publication in London.
35 In 1885, James replaced the word empressement with eagerness. However, he did not
abandon his practice of using French words: he also replaced the English modest with
pudique. Similarly, he kept coiffe while changing the ending by M. Anatole. In all,
more than a dozen French words remained.
36 Mori gai, Mori gai zensh, 38 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1971-1975), VII, pp. 189-97.
Fig. 1. Mori gai, Hanako, in gai zensh, vol. 7 (Tky: Iwanami Shoten,
1973), p. 189. Reproduced by kind permission of Iwanami Shoten
Publishers, Tky (all rights reserved).
Printing foreign words in Roman script in Japan is the result of a conscious

choice, as there are two other ways of transcribing them.37 When gai begins
his text with Auguste Rodin in Roman script, he is indicating more than
anything else, more even than the meaning of the word, its foreign quality.
It is a sample of foreign reality, brought back for display. He includes, of
course, place names such as Faubourg Saint-Germain, any translation
of which would be incomprehensible, but he also includes words which
one would expect to find in Japanese characters: Prince of Kambodscha
(of Cambodge), and even Mademoiselle Hanako. He even goes so far
as to repeat the same sentence twice, first in French (in small caps) and
then in translation: Hence the child goes from physique to metaphysique,
from Physics to Metaphysics. Placing these foreign words in their exotic
form calls up a whole universe, where one is familiar with Beaudelaire
(sic), and with the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle. In other words, gai
is evoking the fascinating, and so distant world of Rodins Paris; indeed,
there was a great fascination for Rodin at that time in Japan.38
******
Short-story authors are great stylists. Each word maintains hidden
relationships with the others, achieving the effectiveness of the whole. But
this effectiveness tends to be formidable. The classic short story is a trap
that imprisons its characters, surrounding them by converging techniques
of distancing. Giving characters their own voice within this framework, far
from helping the author to efface himself and leave them room to defend
their truth, is instead another means of making them typical. Their definition
becomes all the clearer and more brilliant to the reader in that all the traits
converge, but the vivid image they form is terribly confined.
This is a feature that underwent dramatic change in the twentieth century,
when the minorities that had been the object of short stories began to author
them. When female Chicano writers include quotes in their native Spanish,
the effect on the reader is radically different from the use of foreign terms
that we have seen above:39 Postcolonial critics have stressed how minorities
37 English words could either be totally assimilated, their content translated by means
of sino-Japanese ideograms, or the sounds could be transcribed (without translation)
by means of syllabaries. Roman type was very rare and incomprehensible except to
intellectuals.
38 gai published his story just before the journal Shirakaba released a special issue
dedicated entirely to the sculptor.
39 See Consuelo Montes-Granado, Code-Switching as a Strategy of Brevity in Sandra
have been able to write their own authentic voice.40 When minorities
become not only the subjects but also the authors of the narrative, we find
the short story playing the role described by Mary Louise Pratt: that of
allowing for the introduction of new subjects, new social groups.41 But the
classic short stories we have been examining were written for the most part
by relatively privileged white men, operating within a strict framework
of distancing; their use of direct speech does nothing more than make the
distance between the reader and minority characters even greater.
Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-FirstCentury Perspective, ed. by Viorica Patea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 125-36. We are,
of course, reminded that this effect is not automatic by authors like Homi K. Bhabha, The
Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004); and Albert Wendt in his Introduction to
Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980, ed. by Albert Wendt (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1995), pp. ii-iii.
40 See, for example, Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. by Julie Brown (London:
Garland, 1997). See especially Browns Editors Note (pp. xvii-xx), Bill Mullens
Marking Race/Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of Genre,
1933-1946 (pp. 25-46) and Madelyn Jablons Womanist Storytelling: The Voice of the
Vernacular (pp. 47-62). Mullen shows that the creation of Negro Story, a black literary
magazine dedicated to the short story, was part of an attempt to alter the markings
and marketings of race in the short story genre (pp. 34-40). But, as Rebecca Hernndez
points out, even in these new circumstances, an author like the Mozambican Luis
Bernardo Honwana would generally prefer writing in Portuguese in order to preserve
their psychological profile and their full expressive capacity. Rebecca Hernndez,
Short Narrations in a Letter Frame: Cases of Genre Hybridity in Postcolonial Literature
in Portuguese, in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. by Viorica
Patea (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 155-72 (p. 159).
41 Mary Louise Pratt, The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It, Poetics, 10 (1981),
175-94; also in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1994), pp. 91-113 (p. 108). On the role of creative writing workshops
in this new outlook of the short story, see Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of
the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 4-7. See
also James Nagel, who insists on the story published in little magazines (of this
workshops network) as being the ideal tool for minorities to appropriate the telling of
their dramas; the next step being the publishing of cycles of these stories. James Nagel,
The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (Baton Rouge,
LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 255-57.
10. The Narrator, the Reflector

and the Reader
The classic short story makes use of the all participants in the narrative
process author, narrator and reader to create the characteristic
distance between reader and characters. The reader shares with the author
the exhilaration of enjoying the spectacle of this distance. In this chapter,
the short story will once again show its versatility: it can distance the
narrator from the reader, or equally it can create a real proximity to him,
only to increase the distance from the other characters. We will first spend
some time on the concept of the reflector, as described by Henry James,
to show its necessity, but also its dangers: structural distinctions are not
enough, we have to take into account the whole context, the whole strategy
of the text. The reflector does not tell the story that is the role of the
narrator. He is one of the characters, but one privileged by the writer: he
is the one who sees, and through whose eyes we see. In great novels, the
reflector can be a powerful device to help the reader to enter the fictional
world and to get nearer to the characters mental universe. But in classic
short stories even in Jamess it is one more variation on the common
theme of distancing.
The works of James are, of course, good examples of the use of a reflector.
Hardly any of his stories is an Ich-Erzahlung: we usually have a third-person
narrator, but this narrator is not omniscient, and James limits himself to
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.10
what this character knows, hears, sees and, most importantly, feels. It is as
if the writer were placing a filter between us and the spectacle. When this
filter is, to use Jamess words, the most polished of possible mirrors of
the subject, third person narration does not prevent us from participating
in the mental universe of the characters.1 In his critical writings, James
developed at length the idea that through a discriminating, intelligent, and
sensitive reflector, we would appreciate to the full all the subtleties and
beauties of a novels universe.2
Although Jamess distinction between narrator and reflector is
necessary, it is not without danger, especially when as in the works of
the French New Critics it is viewed as having automatic effects. Grard
Genette defined a complete grille by combining the possibilities of
mode (reflector) and voice (narrator).3 When the narrator is one of the
characters, narration is said to be intradiegetic; when he is exterior to it,
extradiegetic; when the reflector is one of the characters we have internal
focalization; external when he is not. This combination of narration
and focalization provides neat divisions, with each compartment
representing one particular technical example. The danger, of course, is to
assume as Genette and the narratologists did after him, that each of these
compartments implies a particular effect. That is, that by using both
external focalization and heterodiegetic narration, one would achieve an
external viewpoint of the narration; and that by reverting to internal
focalization and intradiegetic narration, one would automatically get an
internal perspective on the narrative. When we begin to examine specific
stories, however, we see to the contrary that each of these compartments is
susceptible to a wide variety of uses.
Once our interest lies in the problems of the relationship between
reader, author and characters and we are primarily concerned with
how the one regards the other such mechanical, formal distinctions
1
Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Scribner, 1962), p. 70.
2
The Preface to Princess Cassamassima (ibid, pp. 59-78) in particular, is nearly all dedicated
to reflections on the necessity of such intense perceivers: Their emotions, their stirred
intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal,
our own very adventure (p. 70). James never stops repeating that the choice of a fine
conscience is essential. He almost always has recourse to a third person, except for a
few texts that are among his most bitter publishing failures. See also Anne T. Margolis,
Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1985).
3
Grard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 170-75.
The Narrator, the Reflector and the Reader155
become secondary. We do need to be able to distinguish between the

reflector and the narrator, precisely because the short story will use either
one to continue to bring the reader and author together in admiration of
the distant spectacle. Without it, the profound architecture of some of the
most subtle and best stories cannot be understood. But we cannot take for
granted its particular effect in the texts.
Wayne C. Booth has provided a useful tool for analysis in his distinction
between reliable and unreliable narrators.4 Booths theory helps us
to see that, when it comes to the classic short story, unreliable narrators/
reflectors represent characters; reliable narrators/reflectors never represent
characters but rather represent the reader.5 The reliable narrator is
the person whose word we do not doubt a priori; we do not subject his
statements, arguments or values to a systematic proof. This does not signify
that he is omniscient; simply, that he is in a certain way transparent. We
do not exert before him our capacity for detecting irony. On the other hand,
we distance ourselves from the unreliable narrators discourse. At the very
least, we take what he says with a grain of salt; and at the extreme, we
systematically interpret the opposite of what he says. The factors that make
him unreliable are the same as those that distance the other characters. The
superiority of this distinction over that between voice and mode is that
we are no longer describing external traits (whether the narrator is one of
the characters or not); we are invited to balance the relations between the
different actors in the narrative process by taking into account, equally, the
entire context.
Another critic will bear witness to the necessity and the danger of
these external, formal distinctions. Japanese criticism uses the concept of
first person disguised as third person (sanninsh o kas ichininsh), which
corresponds to one of the essential compartments of Genettes grille:
heterodiegetic narration/internal focalization. Et Jun uses this concept
to formalise the difference between western and Japanese narration.6 For
him, western narration is characterised by the use of the third person and
4
Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp.
57-67.
5
Helmut Bonheim perceives that there can be not only unreliable narrators but also
unreliable speakers and thinkers. Bonheim mentions this in relation to detective stories, but
the phenomenon seems to me also important in serious fiction. See Helmut Bonheim,
The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), p. 71.
6
Et Jun, Nichibunka no taishsei to hitaishsei, Bungakkai, 43:1 (1989), 240-52.
of the past tense, whereas Japanese narration is characterised by the use of

the timeless and of the first person, either disguised or not.
Ets argument ignores the fact that western narratives also make
use of all the resources of voice and mode. But interestingly enough, he
immediately connects this fact of syntax with other rhetorical techniques.
His aim is to show that Japanese is the language of proximity to a character,
and he bases his proof on the distortions that an English translation inflicted
on a novel by Tanizaki Junichir. Ets contextual analysis is subtle enough
to enable him to show that this technique is only one element of a complete
tableau: having recourse to the timeless and to an internal focalization is
accompanied, for example, by the use of a specifically affective vocabulary
(jigo), which brings the reader into the characters subjectivity.7
Unreliable narrators and reflectors

Unreliable narrators and reflectors in short stories are members of the world
being described. They are characters among other characters, distanced
from the reader by the same methods we have seen in previous chapters.
A classic example is Herman Melvilles Bartleby, The Scrivener where the
interest rests on the growing suspicion about the reliability of the narrator,
the Wall Street lawyer, and on our awareness of a double spectacle: the
scene as narrated and the distortion which we suspect has been imposed
on the scene.8 This doubt about what is said or perceived by a narrator
or reflector who is one of the characters is a constant feature of the classic
short story.9
7
However, Et still considers this process to be mechanical, thinking that recourse to one
voice and one mode are automatic guarantees of proximity, whereas obviously the same
affective terms can be included in a strategy of irony in Japanese as well as in European
languages. Note too, with the same reservations on my part, Aleksandr V. Ognev, who
talks about the same compartment of Genettes grille in similar terms, and sees in it
a general characteristic of the contemporary short story: ot avtora, no s tochki zreniya
geroya (in the authors voice, but with the point of view of the character). Aleksandr
V. Ognev, O Poetike sovremennogo russkogo rasskaza (Saratov: Izd-vo Saratovskogo
universiteta, 1973), p. 214.
8
R. Bruce Bickley clearly shows that Melville shares our point of view and not his
narrators in his short stories (and not only in Bartleby). R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., The Method
of Melvilles Short Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975).
9
John M. Ellis, for example, points out that in all the short stories he has analysed, the text
only gains its full value if the reader recognises the unreliable character of the reflector.
The meaning of a text such as Heinrich von Kleists Erdbeben in Chili (Earthquakes in
Chile) is created in a kind of stereoscope in which we see at the same time the scene
presented by the reflector and his distortion of it. However, undoubtedly because his
As we are very near here to what we have seen at length in the previous
chapter, I shall give only one example to make clear the neutrality of devices:
Arthur Schnitzlers Lieutenant Gustl.10 This short story, based entirely on
an interior monologue, was written in 1900, a decade or so after Edouard
Dujardins pioneering use of the device in Les Lauriers sont coups, and long
before James Joyces Ulysses. In this instance we are inside the mind of the
character: the narrators voice is the only one we hear. We should, therefore,
be as close as possible to the character, to his voice, to his inner truth. In
reality, we are no closer than when dialect is used. Gustl is as effectively
discredited from within as he might be in an external narrative.
This distancing begins from the outset with the young officers reflections
on music. He is bored at a concert; he mistakes a mass for an oratorio, and
admits to failing to recognise any difference between the choir and cabaret
singers. Note that the story was published in the Neue Freie Press, one of
the favourite newspapers of the Viennese upper middle class, for whom
music originally a means of obtaining social status in the eyes of the
aristocracy had become a widespread passion.11 By presenting the hero,
before any other description, as fundamentally incapable of appreciating
music, Schnitzler has already effectively labelled him as separate from
the readers more clearly than any explicit judgement could have done.
But Schnitzler does not stop there. Not only does Gustl have bad taste,
not only is he a conceited junior officer who imagines that all women are
attracted to him, but he is in total contradiction to his own values. His
bragging about duels at the beginning of the story is totally out of keeping
with his confusion later that night, and above all his great speeches on
honour are ultimately contradicted by his actions. Schnitzlers ridiculing of
the lieutenant is quasi-explicit in the precise contradiction in terms. Right
limited corpus does not allow for generalisation, he does not extract all the consequences
of his analyses. John M. Ellis, Narration in the German Novelle: Theory and Interpretation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
10 Arthur Schnitzler, Plays and Stories, ed. by Egon Schwarz (New York: Continuum, 1982),
pp. 249-79 (hereafter Schwarz). The original German version can be found in Arthur
Schnitzler, Das erzhlerische Werk (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1981), pp. 207-36
(hereafter Fischer).
11 For more on music as a passion shared by all classes of society in Vienna, see Carl E.
Schorske, Fin-de-sicle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980). For more
on the story and its use of interior monologue, see Heidi E. Dietz Faletti, Interior
Monologue and the Unheroic Psyche in Schnitzlers Lieutenant Gustl and Frulein Else,
in The Image of the Hero in Literature, Media and Society, ed. by Will Wright and Steve
Kaplan (Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2004), pp.
522-57.
after he is insulted by a baker, Gustl states the need to end his life: And
even if he [the baker] had a stroke tonight, Id know it [] Ive got to do
it Theres nothing to it..12 When he learns that the baker in fact died
of a stroke, this completely restores his peace of mind, and he can pretend
that his honour has not been damaged.
The ending underlines the contradiction even further: one would have
thought that the nights anguish would have transformed the lieutenant,
and prompted him to question his somewhat automatic adherence to the
code of military behaviour. Yet Gustl experiences no revelation. The story
ends with what is going through his mind at the thought of fighting a duel
with another man: Just wait, my boy, Im in wonderful form Ill crush
you into mincemeat!.13 The culinary allusion here reminds us of the baker
from earlier in the story, creating the sense of an endless cycle. The stroke
of joy that overwhelms him is the joy of a brutal mercenary. As was often
the case, the objects of this ridicule were quite aware of the distancing at
work the army was outraged by the derision implied in the story and
went so far as to demote Schnitzler for writing it.14 In Lieutenant Gustl,
we remain completely exterior to the character, even though, technically
speaking, we have remained within him: the technical point of view has no
automatic bearing on the perspective.15
Before proceeding to the more complex case of the reliable narrator/
reflector, we must note once again that the fantastic short story uses the
techniques of the classic short story in a much more complex fashion. In
supernatural tales, unreliable narrators/reflectors are an exception; but
this exception allows for powerful effects. For example, by choosing for
12 Schwarz, p. 261.
13 Ibid, p. 279. I have modified the translation here (Ill knock you to smithereens!) to be
closer to the original: Dich hau ich zu Krenfleisch where Krenfleisch is a beef-meat
slice to be eaten with horseradish. See Fischer, p. 236.
14 Details of the negative reception of Lieutenant Gustl by the army can be found in Evelyne
Polt-Heinzl, Arthur Schnitzler: Leutnant Gustl (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), pp. 42-61.
15 Very much akin to this, to my mind, is Simone de Beauvoirs use of the diary as a
framing device in La Femme rompue. Ray Davison emphasises the surprising distance
of this intimate format, and quotes the many passages in which the heroine, Monique
Lacombe, reveals her petty bourgeois interests and fears. However, Davison is
interested in something else: the means that this gives Beauvoir to recognise the pain of
Sartres behaviour towards her: In other words, and paradoxically, because Beauvoir
is so distanced in her conscious mind from Monique Lacombe [] she does manage
to talk about herself [Beauvoir] more interestingly than when she uses the direct
autobiographical mode. Ray Davison, Simone de Beauvoir: La Femme rompue, in
Short French Fiction: Essays on the Short Story in France in the Twentieth Century, ed. by J. E.
Flower (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 71-88 (p. 72).
once not to have a reliable reflector, James strengthens the ambiguity in

The Turn of the Screw. There is still lively controversy about whether the
young English teacher in the story actually sees the two ghosts, and it
has often been stressed that the texts interest lies in this very ambiguity.
The governesss point of view is not immediately doubted, and it is never
openly contradicted by the author; but a whole series of indices prevent
her from reaching the status of reliable reflector. As a result, suspense is
reinforced, and the entry into a fantastic world becomes more troubling
than usual: the reader is constantly invited to question the reality of what
is being conveyed. Thus James creates a stereoscope: the scene and the way
it is perceived.16
Reliable narrators and reflectors

Reliable narrators/reflectors are never representatives of the world
portrayed; and they are the only characters not to be distanced. Yet for all
that, they are not necessarily representatives of the reader, either; sometimes
the narrator is both reliable and foreign. In Voltaires Micromegas, for
example, the narrator Micromegas, a little giant from the far-away planet
Sirius, comes to Earth on a mission of discovery. His impressions of Earth
of course bear the stamp of strangeness, as did those of Jonathan Swifts
Gulliver: customs of the Earth creatures or the Houyhnnhnms are quite
different from those at home in Sirius. By describing eighteenth-century
France and England through foreign eyes, familiar customs suddenly
look very strange, and their faults become more apparent. This device was
quite popular in the eighteenth century, but was used much less frequently
at the end of the nineteenth. However there are still some examples of its
use in classic short stories, including Leo Tolstoys Kholstomer. The author
provides a satire of Russian society through the eyes of a horse a narrator
as far removed from our own ideas as Gulliver or Micromegas. From the
moment we are presented with such a reflector, all that is obvious collapses:
the very idea of owning an animal, for instance, becomes monstrous; and
with it the social structure of Alexander IIs Russia.
16 The same device is found in Maupassant, whose fantastic stories are perhaps the stronger
of his works. In the second, Horla, the narrator is so clear-minded that he forestalls each
of our comments and suspicions. As a reflector, he is not reliable, but he is reliable as a
narrator (in that he analyses what he recounts), and the text gains its power from what
is almost schizophrenia; through this we enter a different world, where our logic is no
longer valid.
This device is not only powerful as a tool for satire. Jamess most famous
short story, Daisy Miller, owes much of its strength to his choice of a reflector
from the Sirius point of view. Frederick Winterbourne is a member of a
very good American family but he has been brought up in Switzerland.
His outlook is stamped with a freshness of perception: he does not know
any other young American girls, so he does not compare Daisy to them
and come to the hasty conclusion that her free and simple manners are
bad. In this way, James can present Daisy as foreign and incomprehensible,
but without cataloguing her. Jamess readers followed Winterbournes
opinion because he shared their fundamental values. Morality is essential
for him: he is not a Frenchman for whom a young womans flirtatious
behaviour would be an attraction. As a result of Winterbournes fresh
perception, readers understood that Daisy could not be described according
to their pre-conceived categories.17
This Sirius point of view exploits the potentialities of the short story
genre to the fullest; it provides enormous vivacity of perception and a
radical exteriority in relation to the subject. For once the readers prejudices
are called into question. But this device does not signify immediacy any
more than in Voltaire, Swift or Tolstoy: Micromegas is interested in men
and their problems, but never gives up his standpoint as an outsider. If the
readers followed Winterbourne in his judgement or rather his absence of
judgement of Daisy, it is precisely because he is not part of her universe.
And even at the end of the story, the readers do not share in the values
of the young woman they have simply ceased to see her in the same
light as they did at the beginning. The short story is able to renew our
perception of an object, but, for all that, it does not take us into its logic.
It is not the Houyhnnhnms values that the reader is invited to share, but
those of Gulliver. Micromegas and Gullivers Travels show us very clearly the
fundamental law: when there is immediacy in a short story, it is always with
an intermediary. The reliable narrator/reflector is the mediator between the
reader and a bizarre world. He is the Parisian of the Normandy stories
who introduces us to the special world of the peasants; he is the Japanese
student in Mori gais Hanako who interprets the world of Auguste Rodin.18
17 On this American girl, see Virginia C. Fowler, Henry Jamess American Girl: The
Embroidery on the Canvas (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
18 He is also, except in the cases mentioned above, the narrator in fantastic stories. In order
for us to want to follow the character into this other world and to accept the account of
events which will make us lose our most obvious points of reference, the short story will
usually resort to a narrator or a reflector in whom we have confidence. But it is always in
Side by side with these Sirians who enable us to see the object in a
different light and judge our world a novo, we find any number of reliable
narrators/reflectors who are the representatives of the reader. The typical
example here would be Franz Kafkas Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony). The
narrator-reflector is a European who has come to visit a remote colony
where torture is a fundamental means of government. He represents
a world where torture could never be legitimated or praised (even if it
could be practiced); his presence, therefore, is a very economical way of
showing the radical foreignness of the values of the officer commanding
the colony. By the insistent mention of the normal values and reasoning
of the narrators world, Kafka refuses to justify the brutal laws that govern
this world. This does not eliminate a certain fascination, but it is produced
through horror, terror, and distance.
Similarly, the central device of Chekhovs Muzhiki (Peasants), the
story we saw in the previous chapter, may well be the authors choice of
reflector.19 Nikolay was born a peasant, but he left his village as an infant
and spent all his life in Moscow, where his work in the best hotel in town
put him in constant contact with all that is most refined. Returning to his
village, he has the reactions of a city-dweller: he looks at the hut from an
external perspective, and through his mediation Chekhov constructs a truly
terrifying vision of rural poverty. The denunciation of the misery and dirt
of the peasants life by one of their own is much more powerful than if it
had come from a country gentleman. What is even more remarkable is that
Chekhov abandons Nikolay as reflector part way through the story. At this
point, Nikolay joins the other characters and will, like them, be distanced.
But the effect has already been accomplished: that first impression of
horror in the face of such tremendous misery will never be questioned.
Right up until the end of the story, Nikolays impressions of the village will
be considered valid, and will serve to distance the scene, even though, as a
character, his behaviour and his values will be challenged.20
order to stress the strangeness of the world described.

19 Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov, ed. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977), pp. 312-53 (hereafter Yarmolinsky). The Russian text can be found in
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983), IX, pp. 281-312 (hereafter Nauka).
20 Nikolays wife, too, is used as a reflector at the beginning of the story. Very quickly her
style, and her religiosity put her at a distance from the reader; but she will have already
fulfilled her role as reflector, which is to jolt us into utter horror.
The definition of the narrator as the representative of the reader allows

for a variety of criteria. When James writes about Europe, he is an American
talking to Americans or to us for whom Europe at the beginning of the
century is just as distant. When Verga describes the misery of the peasants
in the Rivista Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, he is an intellectual speaking
to intellectuals who also share his interest in social problems. But that the
narrator/reflector is the representative of the reader in no way implies that
he belongs to this world by birth: it will be necessary and sufficient for him
to share his values, his ways of judging and of expressing himself.
In Maupassants Mon oncle Jules (My Uncle Jules), the narrator is walking
with his friend, Davranche, when he sees him give twenty francs a lot of
money to a beggar.21 Noting his surprise, Davranche explains how, as a
young man, he found his Uncle From America humbly at work on one
of the imitation steamboats that crossed from Jersey to the mainland. Uncle
Jules the great hope of the family, expected to become a millionaire
had in fact failed to make his fortune in America and had not dared to
return to Le Havre where his relatives lived. In order to survive, he became
an oyster-shucker on one of these cheap steamers. Now a rich man himself,
Davranche gives a lot of money to someone who reminds him of his uncle.
What is interesting is that Davranche takes the opportunity provided by
this account to paint a lurid picture of the material hardships of his own
family, hardships that are basically seen as pitiful and ridiculous:
I remember the pompous air of my poor parents in these Sunday walks,
their stern expression, their stiff walk. [] Jersey is the ideal trip for poor
people. It is not far; one crosses a strip of sea in a steamer and lands on
foreign soil, as this little island belongs to England. Thus, a Frenchman, with
a two-hours sail, can observe a neighboring people at home and study the
customs [] [My father] spread around him that odor of benzine which
always made me recognize Sunday. [] My father was probably pleased
with this delicate manner of eating oysters on a moving ship. He considered
it good form, refined []22
From this description it is clear that a first person account is no guarantee of

immediacy, as so often has been said, even when there is a reliable narrator/
Artinian (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 1308-12 (hereafter Artinian).
The French text can be found in Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis
Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade, 1974), I, pp. 931-38 (hereafter
Pliade).
22 Ibid, pp. 1309-10 (pp. 934-35).
reflector. It is not because the narrator says I that there is no distance

between us and that which he describes, because often he feels distant
from his own surroundings. This is an exemplary case, since the narrator
introduces his own family: the fact that it is his father who is involved does
not lessen the ridicule in the least. The reason for this is that the narrator
has been distinguished from the other characters from the beginning of the
text. The story framing the story showed him walking with the narrator
who can be assumed, at this time, to be a Maupassant, whose image as a
worldly storyteller and elegant gentleman is firmly fixed in the mind of the
readers. This son of a provincial clerical worker has become a true Parisian,
with intimate connections in society: he has very little in common with the
workers of Le Havre. Like Nikolay in Peasants, he has changed his universe:
his tale can therefore distance this world without embarrassment.23 This
gesture seals his membership in Maupassants world, in a community
whose judgements the reader is supposed to share, and which the entire
text reinforces.
There are from then on two possible outcomes. The reader can reject
the text as presented. This is what happened with Chekhovs Peasants in
the face of populist readers, or with Lieutenant Gustl when it was read by
Schnitzlers fellow military officers. The readers saw the fierce distancing
operating against the peasants and officers, and they rejected it in the name
of their own values. We see this amongst more recent critics in the light of
postcolonial and feminist theory; for example, in the reaction of Chinua
Achebe to Conrads Heart of Darkness or Virginia Llewellyn Smith to the
distancing of female characters in Chekhov.24 Too strong an ideological
distance forbids acceptance of a short story. The text will be considered
false, partisan, ill-informed: it is scarcely possible to read a story whose
value system is too foreign, even though a strongly ideological novel like
Tolstoys Voskresenie (Resurrection) can be read without accepting his system
of philosophy.
But usually the reader goes along with the distancing that occurs.
There is enough objective difference whether it be social or temporal
23 To use Andrew Levys words: this is a case, not of having no link with those socially
disenfranchised groups, but of having left them back home. Andrew Levy, The
Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 109.
24 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday 1989), pp.
1-20; and Virginia Llewellyn Smith, Anton Chekhov and the Lady with the Dog (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973).
between the readers and the character to justify the distancing in the
readers eyes. At this point, the text has created precisely two groups: in
one we find the characters and the unreliable narrator/reflector; in the other
will be found the author, the reliable reflector/narrator, and with them the
reader. By definition, the reliable narrator expresses values that will tend
to be accepted; when he judges a character, we join in the judgement. It
is Davranche laughing at his pitiful father, it is Kafkas traveller, and it is
Nikolay denouncing the terrible state of Russia in Peasants. If the reader
does not join with the author and the narrator/reflector in distancing the
characters, he or she cannot enjoy the story. We can only read in the way
the text invites us. In a sentence such as: [My father] considered it good
form, refined from My Uncle Jules, we are invited to laugh at the father,
and to question his taste.25 Similarly, in Peasants, when the narrator says
[] going into the log cabin, he was positively frightened: it was so dark
and crowded and squalid [...] black with soot and flies. [] The poverty, the
poverty!, we are invited to share in the reflectors disgust.26 The reader will
adopt the reliable narrator/reflectors perspective point in the technical
sense that is used in painting: that is, the point from which one gains the
correct perspective on the picture. This positioning is imperative to the
readers enjoyment of the short story.
25 Artinian, p. 1310 (Pliade, p. 935).

26 Yarmolinsky, p. 312 (Nauka, p. 281).
11. Distance and Emotion
In Mikhail Bakhtins terms, a text is monologic and diametrically opposed

to the polyphonic novel when it lets us hear one truth only, privileging one
voice over all others.1 In the classic short story this voice is that of the reader
through his representatives the narrator and reflector. The polyphonic
text can claim an ethical superiority, but this does not mean that monologic
texts are without power, charm or value.2 The classic short story is perfectly
adapted to satire the ethical value of which is evident. It can help readers
to see vividly all the shortcomings of a character or a situation (social or
moral) by putting it at a distance. It can even although it does not avail
itself of the possibility very often in the period we are considering put the
readers themselves at a distance. But the short story does all this without
ever renouncing its monologism.
The short story with a dilemma

In order to create polyphony, as defined by Bakhtin, the different voices
involved must be a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights
1
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 5-6.
2
For more on the potential superiority of polyphonic over monologic texts (in relation
to epic, see Florence Goyet, Penser sans concepts. Fonction de lpope guerrire (Paris:
Champion, 2006).
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.11
each of them must have their own validity.3 Not one of the characters
in Fyodor Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot is discredited;
faced with contradictory truths, the reader recognises the impossibility of
choosing between them. There are very few classic short stories that expose
us to several voices. Even in the exceptional examples where we find two
voices in a short story, both characters are equally discredited. Instead of
polyphony, the result is the narrative image of aporia.
A good example of a short story with two voices is Anton Chekhovs
Vragi (Enemies).4 Kirilov, a doctor whose son has recently died of a drawnout illness, is called upon by a local landowner, Abogin, who asks him to
attend to his sick wife. At first the doctor refuses he is exhausted from
his sons illness and death but in the end agrees. When they get to the
landowners house, they discover that his wife was feigning illness so
that she could run off with her lover while her husband was fetching the
doctor. Desperate, Abogin unloads his conjugal problems on the doctor
who resents him for having brought him there. A terrible scene in which
they insult each other is followed by some abstract remarks from Chekhov
about how misfortune separates the unfortunate instead of bringing them
together.
There is an important difference here from the stories we have seen so
far: the two characters face off without either one getting the better of the
other, without truth being on one side. Chekhov is careful to prevent us
from being able to make a choice. We are no longer in the more common
situation, as in Guy de Maupassants My Uncle Jules, which we saw in the
last chapter, where the character is discredited in favour of the narrators
values. At first glance, we even have the feeling that, for once, Chekhov gives
each of these characters a certain credibility. The story begins by portraying
the doctor without any attempt at distance. Through a powerful description
of his distress at his sons death, he is sympathetic to the reader. Chekhov
takes great pains to detail concretely and very vividly his terrible
exhaustion. His shock has left him no longer in possession of his faculties:
he cannot find the door of his study, for example, and he lifts his right foot
3
Bakhtin (1984), p. 5.
4
Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmaster and Other Stories, trans. by Constance Garnett (New
York: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 15-34 (hereafter Garnett). The original Russian can be found
in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols (Moscow: Nauka,
1974-1983, VI, pp. 30-43 (hereafter Nauka). Page references will be given first to the
translation, then to the original in brackets.
Distance and Emotion167
too high to cross the threshold.5 The reader is with the character because
of his vulnerability, and ready to react to the total incongruity of Abogins
demands on him. At the beginning of the story, Abogin is one of those
classic characters of Chekhov, the prisoner of his own preoccupations,6
who treats a childs death on the same level as a mild discomfort.7 Kirilov,
then, obviously interprets his own adventure as a simple antithetic tension:
an exhausted doctor, affected in both body and emotions, is taken twenty
kilometres from home to be used as an accessory in an adulterous episode.
What is remarkable here is that the entire story prohibits the reader
from sharing in Kirilovs interpretation. After bringing the doctor into
true proximity with the readers sympathies, it then distances him and
brings Abogin closer. Faced with the unfortunate doctor, Abogin is not, in
fact, the tedious person we first see, but a man in whose face there was
a suggestion of something generous, leonine;8 he is truly suffering over
his wifes illness and is afraid she will die. The story then reveals that the
young womans father died from an aneurism, making the landowners
anguish all the more understandable.
But the interest of this unusual closeness to the character becomes clear
as soon as we see the portraits that Chekhov draws one after the other. The
essential trait is then revealed: Chekhov, by reversing their roles, creates an
absolute symmetry between his protagonists. Abogin the annoyance is
described in a purely meliorative way, whereas the doctor for whom we
were ready to feel sympathy is distanced:
The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not good-looking.
There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly look about his
lips, thick as a Negros, his aquiline nose, and listless, apathetic eyes. []
Looking at his frigid figure one could hardly believe that this man had a
wife, that he was capable of weeping over his child. Abogin presented a very
5
Ibid, p. 18 (pp. 32-33). The absence of distance in this opening is summed up in the
strange passage on the subtle beauty [] of human sorrow [] which only music can
convey (p. 19 [p. 33]): to define the beauty of this grief is to invite the reader to share in
this truly musical emotion.
6
See Kataevs analyses of this incapacity of Chekhovs heroes to emerge from their
preoccupations, which is one of his great methods of discrediting. V. B. Kataev, Proza
Chekhova: Problemy Interpretatsii (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1979), p. 62.
For a partial translation, see Vladimir Kataev, If Only We Could Know: An Interpretation of
Chekhov, trans. by Harvey Pitcher (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
7
When hearing of the death of the child, Abogin is upbeat: A wonderfully unhappy
day wonderfully! What a coincidence Its as though it were on purpose! Garnett, p.
17 (Nauka, p. 32).
8
Ibid, p. 25 (p. 38).

different appearance. He was a thick-set, sturdy-looking, fair man with a big
head and large, soft features; he was elegantly dressed in the very latest
fashion. In his carriage, his closely buttoned coat, his long hair, and his face
there was a suggestion of something generous, leonine;9
The phrase in emphasis clarifies the antithesis present in every feature. The
portrait of the doctor is astonishingly clumsy, and the narrator goes so far
as to make an improbable judgement: one could hardly believe that this
man had a wife, that he was capable of weeping over his child. The portrait
of Abogin, on the other hand, is enough to moderate his violent arrival in
the grieving household. The two presentations, then, are balanced so that
neither one is favoured.
Nevertheless, it cannot be called polyphony. The central direction of the
text is to position these two characters back to back. We could say that Abogin
is only rehabilitated to the precise degree to which Kirilov is discredited:
he is Kirilovs pendulum, negative and positive to exactly the same degree.
Once again the proximity permitted by the short story is transitive. The two
enemies have been built in perfect symmetry in order to make it possible
for Chekhov to state the dilemma.10 To achieve this it was necessary that the
two men not despise each other at the outset their hatred had to come
from the situation itself. If Abogin had been a comic cuckold, there would
have immediately existed the classic tension between the heroic, dutiful
doctor and the amorous, ridiculous landowner, both well-known types
in Russian literature. Instead the diptych allowed Chekhov to clarify the
abstract problem he is dealing with, a problem whose terms he explicitly
articulates at the very end of the text: instead of bringing the characters
together as we expect, their misfortune makes them loathe each other.
Even the unusual nuances of the characters do not prevent Chekhov
from judging them definitively and conclusively. Half way through the
story, Abogin will again be discredited. The moment he discovers his young
wifes deception, he burdens Kirilov with his complaints about the fugitive
as well as a very complete picture of his family life. Chekhov ironically
disowns him, as is clear in a short passage about the remedy which should
be applied to this so-called incurable grief: If he had talked in this way
for an hour or two, and opened his heart, he would undoubtedly have felt
9
Ibid (emphasis mine).
10 We can only comprehend the meaning of the title Enemies when we recognise that it
refers to the fundamental confrontation at the heart of the text, and not to the history of
either one of the characters.
better.11 That is: if he had received a sympathetic reception from the doctor,
his burst of confidence would have allowed him to assuage his grief and
prevented him from doing anything needless and absurd. Chekhov here
takes his distance from the grief of Abogin.12 For his part the doctor will be
explicitly discredited at the end, in two almost identical formulae: he will
retain unjust and inhumanly cruel thoughts from this confrontation, a
conviction unjust and unworthy of the human heart.13
In this indictment of the two men, neither one is given preference, yet,
for all that, neither logic is shown as valid. Superior to them both, the
narrator dispenses abstract explanations, and unyieldingly contrasts the
two behaviours, carefully and symmetrically discrediting first one and
then the other. What is gained from this is a proof: a precise and utterly
inescapable vision of the narrowness of these two worlds. Chekhov is
using, in a particular way, the essential techniques of the genre, such as
I have been describing from the beginning of this book. What makes this
very different from the other short stories is his thematic exploitation
of tension. Instead of simply being used to structure a story and give it
sufficient autonomy, the tension serves to bring the two worlds face to face,
revealing their radical narrowness. In every other respect, these stories
with a dilemma are very standard. They operate on paroxysms.14 They
are based on the readers preconceptions: the figure of the doctor caught
between his duty and his personal grief and the landowner trapped in
his ideas of modern love are typical. The confrontation serves to invert
each of the presupposed concepts (doctor who is scarcely human, amorous
11 Garnett, p. 30 (Nauka, p. 41).

12 Following the pattern with which we are now so familiar in the classic short story, all the
techniques converge to prevent our comprehension of Abogins behaviour: once he has
got hold of Kirilov in his car, he does not give a single word in response to the doctors
request to return home for a moment to get someone to stay with his wife, who is all
alone in the house with the dead child. Both men sit without any communication, and
their perception of nature is purely mimetic of their own feelings, whereas we know
that for Chekhov the capacity to see the beauty of nature for itself is the touchstone of a
characters soul. On the importance of details in Chekhov, see Aleksandr P. Chudakov,
Poetika Chekhova (Moscow: Nauka, 1971).
13 Garnett, p. 33 (Nauka, p. 42).
14 Examples of paroxysms in the story include not only the death of the child but also the
fact that Kirilov and his wife are too old to have another (Andrey was not merely the
only child, but also the last child, p. 19); Abogins arrival just when the boy has died;
the trivial reason for the drama (adultery); the extreme style of the character portraits;
the fact that Abogin loves his wife like a slave; and Abogins risible readiness to apply all
modern ideas.
landowner who has nobleness). When the short story does present two
voices, it sets them back to back, like fraternal enemies.
In this respect, the short story works counter to the great novel. For
proof we need only examine Jamess different use of the international
theme in his short stories and novels. James, a voluntary exile in England,
loved the country enough to apply for citizenship: unquestionably he was
predestined not to be able to choose between the often antithetic Old and
New World. What is striking is that, in his short stories, this dilemma goes
through a distancing of the two cultures, through a dramatisation of the
conflict between them. We have a particularly clear example of this in the
difference between the novel The Golden Bowl and its sketch, the short story
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie. Both are centred around the marriage of a
young American woman and an Italian prince. In the short story, the prince
is desperate to marry Lily Gunton a fresh incarnation of Daisy Miller
and she burns with the same ardour. The obstacle that arises between them
is none other than the symmetrical intransigence of Lily and the princes
family over one of their many different social customs: the prince asks that
Lily be the first to write to his mother, and the young woman absolutely
refuses.
As in all short stories that deal with an international theme, the tension
in Miss Gunton is created between the two opposite worlds. It is further
emphasised by the use of a young English woman as reflector, Lady
Champer, through whose eyes we see Lily. From her first words Its
astonishing what you take for granted! Lady Champer poses the problem
of different, irreconcilable concepts; for an English lady as for an Italian
prince, what Lily considers natural is constantly a source of amazement.
As Lady Champer explains to the prince, it is the responsibility of the family
in the Americans universe to welcome a young fiance, especially if she is
an orphan. But, nevertheless, Lady Champer goes on to explain to Lily that,
for an Italian princess, there is no question of sacrificing the homage due
to her rank, especially if the fiance is a foreigner. Lily ends up marrying
an American, to the princes great despair. It is not really surprising that
James was able to publish the text at the same time in both countries: in
the London Cornhill, and in Truth in America. He is not in fact dealing with
either Americans or Italian princes, but with the gulf that separates them
both. The strangeness of each custom is delineated and underlined, because
the presence of the other universe puts it in perspective.
We never find in Jamess great novels this unyielding opposition between

the Old and the New World; instead there is a progressive discovery, a
true interpenetration. In The Golden Bowl, the two worlds interact in a much
more subtle, dialectic fashion than in the short story. The friend of the two
young people is no longer an English noblewoman, but an American.15 The
interior world of the young woman and her value system are not a source
of surprise for her as in the short story. She no longer serves to reveal the
potential foreign quality of the character of the young American; rather
she allows us to penetrate more deeply the subtlety of her feelings and
attitudes.
Clash, confrontation, unyielding opposition: the pictures of Europe and
America in the short stories are based on radical incomprehension. Jamess
The Modern Warning perhaps provides the most exemplary expression of
this dilemma between the two worlds: in it the heroine dies from having
tried to be faithful to both universes at the same time. The young American,
Agatha, marries a high-ranking English conservative, Sir Rufus ignoring
the warnings of her brother, a Yankee patriot lawyer. For many years she
is untroubled by her international position, living as a married woman
amid her house and her garden, her children and her social circle. But
after a journey to America, her English husband decides to write a book
explaining the mistakes and perversities of the young democracy. Agatha
tries to persuade him that he has misjudged her country, just as she had
tried to convince her brother of his unfairness towards Sir Rufus. Unable
to reconcile the two countries world visions, she finally commits suicide.
This death is more than a melodramatic end to a story that had dangerous
leanings in this direction already. It is the only possible conclusion if
we are to take into account both sides of the problem as presented by
James throughout his tale. Obviously, like many an aporia, it is perfectly
possible to go beyond this fundamental tension, but only within a dialectic
framework. Having built its characters as exemplary representatives of
their category, defined by their bizarre or ridiculous foibles, the short story
does not have sufficient flexibility to change them in any meaningful way.
We should note in passing that, in the best of cases, the short stories
with dilemmas can lead the reader to question his or her own values.
When an English person reads Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, An International
15 James often used confidants like this, who play the role of a reflector: they show the
hero outside of his own self-awareness, and they also make it possible to understand the
richness of the feelings and thoughts he articulates.
Episode, or The Modern Warning, the symmetrical and reciprocal distancing

of the two universes brings about a boomerang effect, in which even the
readers values are also discredited. At the beginning of An International
Episode, an Englishman laughs at the bizarre qualities of the New World,
but ultimately he will be dislodged from the comfortable position he usually
occupies in the short story. If the reader is ready to accept the distancing in
the first panel of the diptych then she will hardly be able to deny it in the
second, even when it concerns her directly.
As we have seen, the short story concentrates on a case, an abstract
little problem, a dilemma for which no character has a satisfactory solution.16
The reader is generally invited to remain above the fray and can therefore
maintain a position of superiority in relation to the spectacle. But here, as
in some of Chekhovs short stories, the reader is encouraged to use her
superior position to distance herself from her own ideas and prejudices and
gain a new perspective on her own preconceptions. The short story with
a dilemma belongs at the outer limits of the universe of classic exotic
short stories, while still functioning in essentially the same way.
Readers emotional response to the classic short story

In his work on Nikolai Gogols influential Shinel (The Overcoat), Boris
Eikhenbaum has made clear the profound dual aspect of the short story
genre.17 The storys central character, Akaki Akakevich, is defined mostly
by his persona as a pitiful hero, someone who simultaneously stirs both
our sympathy and our ridicule. Eikhenbaum laid bare the signs of what I
have called distancing in this idea of ridicule. In particular, he showed that
the famous passage with the refrain why are you mistreating me? is not
a plea for Gogol in favour of his pathetic hero.18 Rather, the passage creates
a contrast with the neutral, impersonal tone of the narration. Eikhenbaums
analysis takes into account the puns and wordplays on the name of Akaki,
the heroic-comic tone, and the use of absurd-sounding grandiose and
16 Were simply the case as the character of Stuart Straith says in Broken Wings. Henry
James, The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel, 12 vols (New York: Rupert
Hart Davis, 1960), XI, p. 232.
17 Boris Eikhenbaum, How Gogols Overcoat is Made, in Gogols Overcoat: An
Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. by Elizabeth Trahan (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982), pp.
21-36.
18 Ibid, p. 28.
fantastic words like hemorrhoidal.19 This total strategy establishes what

Eikhenbaum calls a grotesque relationship with the subject in which the
mimicry of laughter alternates with the mimicry of sorrow.20
One of the most common manifestations of this tension characteristic
of the classic short story is the coexistence of ridicule and sympathetic
emotion, although some stories unite sordid realism and emotion
(without ridiculing the characters) or intellectual understanding without
compassion in all three cases, however, the framework is provided by the
essential monologism of the genre. Akutagawa Rynosuke, in particular,
has manipulated with extraordinary dexterity this mix of cruelty and pity
for his characters. At the heart of a short story such as Imogayu (Yam Gruel),
there is both distancing and the recognition of the hapless hero Gois
humanity which will lead to our pity for him.21
What is interesting is the extreme to which distancing is carried in a
story that also portrays the hero as one of our brothers. Not only does
Akutagawa prevent the readers attachment to the character at the beginning
of Yam Gruel by interrupting his argument under various different pretexts,
but he also provides a portrait of Goi that is deliberately paroxystic and
predictable: he is ugly, cowardly, slovenly and is seen as the anti-hero,
adorned with an Homeric epithet the red-nosed Goi.22 Akutagawa then
inflicts on Goi an heroic-comic treatment with the great theme of the
unique goal of existence: Goi lives in the hope of one day eating his fill of
yam gruel, and on the day when a practical joke fills him with disgust for
this meal, he will literally no longer have an existence.
It is strictly within this framework that there arises another aspect, latent
in the very definition of the character: the pathetic being, worthy of our
sympathy. Like Akaki Akakevich in The Overcoat, Goi complains pitifully
that he is being persecuted. This takes the form of an antiphon of drawling
echoes: Why did you do that.23 Such disarray interjects a few seconds of
19 Ibid, p. 27. This does not, of course, explain why the text has always been understood
as the expression of a sympathetic point of view. Note, however, that Gogols tone
is grossly distorted in translation by the suppression of the frequent play on sounds
considered ridiculous by the Russians.
20 Ibid, p. 29.
21 Akutagawa Rynosuke, Japanese Short Stories by Rynosuke Akutagawa, trans. by Takashi
Kojima (New York: Liveright, 1952), pp. 45-71. For the original Japanese, see Akutagawa
Rynosuke, Akutagawa Rynosuke zensh, 19 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten, 1954-1955), I,
pp. 85-105.
22 Ibid, p. 48 (p. 87).
23 Ibid.
trouble in the mind of his persecutors, and Akutagawa develops this theme
by introducing the character of a young provincial officer, who does not
belong to the closed little world of this feudal court. Through his eyes, Goi
suddenly changes status, for him and for us:
Of course, at first he, too, joined the others in ridiculing the red-nosed Goi
without reason. But one day he happened to hear Gois question, Why did
you do that? and the words stuck in his mind. From that time on he saw Goi
in a different light, because he saw a blubberer, persecuted by a hard life,
peeping from the pale and stupid face of the undernourished Goi.24
Note the pale and stupid face from which this new visage of Goi is
peeping. In other words, the story works on the same material in two
contradictory ways, in order to release the opposing potentialities. We are
not led to question our judgement of Goi as an individual: we are offered a
proof of an abstract truth. Basically Akutagawa is saying that every man is
your brother, no matter how ridiculously wretched he may be.
This development in our perception of Gois character is by no means the
climax and end of the story. It goes on to tell us about a nasty trick played
on Goi: a superior officer takes him far away from his home and serves
him so many pitchers of yam gruel that he becomes sick. The revelation
of Gois humanity in the eyes of the young provincial functions as the
background against which emerges our reading of this grotesque episode.
His ridicule is constantly driven home at the same time as we witness his
rehabilitation. The young officers reaction enlightens our vision of the hero
without destroying the effect of distancing: the constant insistence on Gois
cowardice, for example, does not allow us to ignore how ridiculous he is.25
Sordid realism is another mode of the short story, in which the
innumerable little men (to use Gogols words) of the time are also
subjected to a double treatment by the author. In these stories, scenes will
be loaded with unbearable misery, making us feel an immense pity for the
character, while at the same time firmly distancing him. Examples from
our body of authors include: Maupassants The Vagabond, Akutagawas The
Tangerines, Vergas Nedda and Rosso Malpelo, and Chekhovs Sleepy, Vanka
and Anyuta. The latter of these stories provides an exemplary summary of
24 Ibid, pp. 48-49 (pp. 87-88).

25 Crossing the moor on the way to the officers house, Goi trembles like a leaf. One day,
he finally dares to defend an unfortunate dog because he is only dealing with children:
But on this occasion, since they were children, he could muster up some courage. Ibid,
p. 50 (p. 89).
the problematic I am trying to untangle here.26 First we should note Anyutas

extraordinary effectiveness: from Tolstoy to Lenin and the Moderns, this is
one of the stories most loved by the Russians. It is also a complete anthology
of the techniques of sordid realism, based on paroxysm. Anyuta is a poor
girl who lives with a destitute medical student in a seedy hotel where they
occupy the cheapest room. They have no fire, no tobacco and no tea,
and the young woman, who is extremely thin and pale, takes up sewing
in order to support them both. The description of the state of their room
speaks for itself:
Crumpled bedclothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy
slop-pail filled with soapsuds in which cigarette ends were swimming, and
the litter on the floor all seemed as though purposely jumbled together
in one confusion.27
This extreme misery is the backdrop for the development of the essential
tension: the paroxysm of indifference on the part of the student, Klochkov,
is contrasted with Anyutas extreme devotion. There is an example that
captures this tension perfectly: in order to review his anatomy lesson, the
future doctor draws ribs in crayon on Anyutas nude body, so that she
looks as though she had been tattooed.28 Anyuta shivers with cold and is
afraid that the student, noticing it, would stop drawing and sounding her,
and then, perhaps, might fail in his exam.29 Klochkov scolds her when she
complains timidly of cold hands, and leaves her to shiver even after he has
finished: You sit like that and dont rub off the crayon, and meanwhile Ill
learn up a little more.30
I will not elaborate here on the central development: Chekhov shows
Anyutas silent memory of all the students she had known, all of whom
had gone on to achieve great success in life:
Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of
course, like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was
26 Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhovs Short Stories, ed. by Ralph E. Matlaw (New York:
Norton, 1979), pp. 20-23 (hereafter Matlaw). For the Russian text, see Nauka, IV, pp.
340-44.
27 Ibid, p. 20 (p. 340).
28 I had the opportunity to see this story performed by Soviet actors in Paris in 1988.
The audience of course laughed at the assimilation, in the same breath, of Anyuta and a
skeleton (One must study them in the skeleton and the living body I say, Anyuta, let
me pick them out, p. 21). The actors were following the drift of the text by emphasising
the effects: after Klochkov had drawn her ribs, Anyuta really did look like a skeleton.
29 Matlaw, p. 21 (Nauka, p. 341).
30 Ibid.

living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an artist, and the fifth was
said to be already a professor.31
We simply note that this is the great Chekhovian theme of deceptive

representations of reality. Anyuta, an unreliable reflector, unleashes a
chain of logic that is in no way acceptable to the reader: because they are
now respectable people, they have forgotten her. What follows will also
develop the deceptive representations of Klochkov, who wants to get rid
of Anyuta when a painter friend makes him ashamed of his unaesthetic
life. Blinded by his wish to be respectable, he wants to remove Anyuta
from his life, and does not understand that it is she, alone, who gives his
life substance.
In Russian society at the end of the nineteenth century bathed in
good sentiments and an atmosphere of Christian piety that dictated values
if not behaviours such a story was a powerful denunciation. It revealed
with terrible force the hypocrisy of the time and showed readers that it was
wrong to allow such situations to happen around them. But it is important
to understand that the very source of this effectiveness, of this powerful
emotion that has captivated generations of readers, is created in and by the
radical distancing. Anyuta is worthy of all our pity, but her world vision
is not in the least valid. We are moved because we see the degree to which
she errs, the degree to which she is excluded from society as a whole and
incapable of even participating in its ways of thinking. The author places
us totally outside the world of the young protagonists, in a place where he
can show us the architecture of this strange spectacle, and the inescapable
destiny awaiting its characters.
Presenting us with characters whose behaviour we shall understand,
but from afar, is another of the usual ways of creating emotion in the classic
short story.32 A good example of this is found in a simple and also famous
story: Maupassants Le Vieux (The Old Man), also known as Les Douillons
(Apple Turnovers).33 The Chicots are a peasant couple in Normandy. The old
31 Ibid.
32 Although he does not see distance as a characteristic trait of the short story, I find
parallel analyses in Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See especially his analysis of Ambrose
Bierces Chickamauga, pp. 70-71.
(Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 544-48. For the original French text, see
Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
collection La Pliade, 1974), I, pp. 1130-37.
father is dying, and the couple is annoyed because he is taking his time to
do so. Since they are sure his death is imminent, they decide to invite the
neighbours immediately to his funeral, so as not to delay the farming work,
and the wife makes apple turnovers to offer to the guests. But, as we know,
the father will not be dead when the guests arrive, and the peasants will
have to give another burial reception.
What is interesting about this short story is the extreme clarity of what
is at stake; the logic of the characters is convincingly followed through to
the end. And yet the comprehension of the reader is essentially limited, and
allows for the defining of our emotion. The author makes it clear that the
Chicots are not departing in any way from the rural customs in counting
on the fathers death. They know that the mayor will authorise them to
hold the funeral immediately after he dies, despite the law, as he did for
old man Renard, who died just at sowing time:34 in this community,
farming comes first. The reader feels convinced of this: we are ready to
recognise the necessity of not endangering the harvest in order to follow
what is no more than a simple custom. In a world that is so poor, it seems
normal to ignore the sentimentality of a death, since the deceased will not
know any difference. But acknowledging this necessity can only be done
by establishing a radical difference between our universe and theirs. The
portraits, first of the wife and then of the husband, are predictably marked
with bestial imagery:
Her bony figure, wide and flat []. A once white bonnet, now yellow,
covered part of her hair, pulled tight over her head. Her dark face, thin, ugly,
toothless, showed that wild animal-like expression peasant faces often have.
[] probably no more than forty, but he looked sixty, wrinkled, gnarled
[]. His outsized arms hung down along his body.35
This description does not prepare us to share in the logic of these

characters on an equal footing and accept the validity of their reactions,
their judgements and their behaviour. Signs of their strangeness continue
to accumulate: the legions of rats which scurried about day and night
in their attic; the earthen floor, rough and damp which seemed slippery
with grease; their rooms separated by a ragged piece of local calico.
And of course Maupassants use of direct speech leaves no room for
empathy. The author describes the dying old man as a disembodied
sound: A regular, rough sound hard breathing, gasping, whistling,
34 Ibid, p. 547 (p. 1134).
35 Ibid, pp. 544-45 (pp. 1130-31).
with a gargling like a broken water pump came from the shadowy
bed on which an old man was dying, the peasant womans father.36 The
peasant woman repeats the narrators brutal image when she talks to her
husband: Hes been gurgling like that since noon []. [Its] still gurgling
[] Doesnt [it] sound like a pump thats got no water?.37 There is a rapid
transition from indications of a person (Hes been gurgling) to those of
inanimate objects: a pump; its and it referring to the man. Mistakes
and mispronunciations are another way of creating a contrast between our
way of speaking and that of the peasants. So is, of course, the insistence
on the material aspects of the fathers death. French readers tend to
remember the title of this story as Les Douillons (a French dialect word for
dumplings), which embody the peasants unemotional view of death:
the peasant woman is so absorbed in the preparation of her dumplings,
and so unwilling to lose any time, that she does not even check on her
dying father.
Yet again note that there is as much sympathy for the characters as is
possible in a classic short story: the reader is well aware of the peasant womans
anxiety during the aborted funeral, when she kept going to the cellar for cider.
Pitchers came up and were emptied with the utmost speed.38 Food and cider
are the womans only thought: she is going to have to make another batch of
dumplings, she and her husband will have to invite everyone again its a
catastrophe for their poor household. We understand, but this understanding
brings with it the recognition of the essential difference that exists between
their world and ours, the gulf separating two kinds of humanity: one which
honours the dead, and one which treats death with brutal practicality.39
In a different, more political and less literary context, all this would no
doubt have been considered classist.40 Obviously the reader can always
36 Ibid, p. 545 (p. 1131).
37 Ibid, pp. 545-46 (p. 1131). I have modified the translation slightly to be closer to the
original.
38 Ibid, p. 548 (p. 1136).
39 This is a recurring idea in Maupassants representation of peasants. See for example
this passage from En famille: In the suburbs of Paris, which are full of people from the
provinces, one meets with the indifference toward death, even of a father or a mother,
which all peasants show; a want of respect, an unconscious callousness which is common
in the country, and rare in Paris. Ibid, p. 1032 (p. 206).
40
And indeed when it comes to racism, the short story is recognised as the most heinous
genre in the representation of black people until the 1950s. See Bill Mullen, Marking Race/
Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of Genre, 1933-1946, in
Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. by Julie Brown (London: Garland, 1997), pp.
25-46.
decide to recognise a real connection between his own world and that of the
peasants. This supposes, however, an external detour, a prior decision. If
the reader decides a priori that the values of her own world are not superior
to those of the peasants, if she assumes that her own are hypocritical, then
she will praise the story for its honesty. But even in this case, the reader still
remain within the framework described previously: it is not a question of
adopting the peasants values, but of comparing side by side their values
and ours, one set challenging the other.41
******
The three different strategies we just saw for creating sympathy in a
short story are profoundly akin to one another. In them, as in so many
simpler texts, the short story brilliantly exploits its status as an exotic
text in relation to its readers. Its own mode of action is precisely by way of
establishing a maximum distance between the reader and the spectacle. The
Sirius point of view, of which we talked in the previous chapter, allows
a familiar reality to be seen in a different light. By revealing, in Kholstomer,
contemporary Russian society through the eyes of a horse, Tolstoy was
extracting the maximal distance and most powerful emotion of which the
genre is capable. All the short stories present, in a strikingly lively fashion,
scenes we probably have not been able to see, and characters whom we
have approached without realising: prostitutes and pariahs of all kinds,
of course, but also the petty clerical workers whose mediocrity hides their
misery. We no longer ignore them but rather recognise their spectacular
strangeness.
We can now understand why the short story was celebrated by all the
revolutionary governments (the prize for the best short story has been a
characteristic trait of socialist countries, from Tunisia to Eastern Europe): it
is the perfect vehicle for denunciation. It should not surprise us that Lenin
was so fond of Chekhovs Anyuta. Not only did the short story succeed
brilliantly in making the atrocity of a situation apparent, it was also able
to show that the horror of the characters behaviour was rooted in the
deceptive representations which they had of reality, in their incapacity
to understand correctly the relationships of power and their own situation.
41 In any case I do not think that this is the effect that the story was supposed to produce
on the readers of Le Gaulois: the peasants are too clearly distanced and the discourse on
peasant indifference in the face of death is too characteristic.
The short story is the tool of political awareness, and politicians like Lenin
saw it as a wonderful means of enlightening their contemporaries.
But we can, of course, make the same reproach as Hegel made to the
philosophers of the French Enlightenment: the very idea of philosophy
bringing light to those who do not possess it, in the same way the idea
of transforming the life of peasants in Normandy or the Russian petty
bourgeoisie, implies a position of superiority. It implies belief in the
universality of ones own values, in the necessity of establishing them in
these foreign worlds social or geographic. Postcolonial studies have
taught us that the concept of exoticism is only apparently neutral, and that to
consider an object or person exotic implies a very definite world orientation:
on the one hand the West, and on the other a foreign world, perceived from
the superior perspective of a civilized country. The emotion may be very
strong, and the short story can impart to its readers a profound interest in
the misery of the masses, or the fate of petty nobility like Goi. It makes no
difference: the essential attitude is a form of condescension: one looks down
on these characters.
In so far as this, the classic short story is quite naturally the progeny
of the end of the nineteenth century, as is exoticism. Vincenette Maigne
summarises the traits we have seen deployed in this chapter:
the term exoticism itself appears moreover in the period of colonial
expansion when all the representations of the French [] comfort the country
in its image of the superiority of western civilization, with a benevolent
overture to the distant foreign lands, looked on as inferior, barbarous, but
interesting (cf. the very formal orientalism of this period which does not
consider the indigenous representative to be equal in dignity, but simply a
spectacle which is picturesque in its costumes or strange in its customs).42
In this framework, the validation of the short story lies precisely in the
belief in progress that ruled the last decades of the nineteenth century.
When Chekhov treats the subjects of the story Peasants so harshly, when
Verga willingly dwells on the sordid realism of his settings, and when
Maupassant accumulates portraits of limited, ignorant and superstitious
peasants, it is because they are all trying to advance civilization.
Maupassants Le Baptme (The Christening) is emblematic of this approach
an intellectual approach for once rather than the desire to make his reader
42 Vincenette Maigne, Exotisme, volution en diachronie du mot et de son champ

smantique, in Exotisme et cration. Actes du colloque international (Lyon: LHermes,
1985), pp. 9-16 (p. 12, translation ours).
laugh or procure for him any strong sensation. In this horrifying story, a
doctor relates how peasants, in order to show respect for the baptismal
customs of their region, have exposed their baby to the rigorous cold of
winter (their tradition has it that the baby should wait naked for the priest)
then, having all got drunk, have left him to die of cold in the ditch where they
had fallen. This story certainly belongs among the innumerable caricatures
of peasants, and it displays the characteristic refusal to participate in the
logic of the other. But in this case, the refusal is explicitly justified, and
reveals the general direction of the genre: participation in the logic of the
peasants would have meant granting validity to a pernicious practice.
It is almost always possible to accuse the short story of western
centrism, and to show that it is based firmly on the readers values. But
at the end of the nineteenth century, there was not an ethnology respectful
of the rites and customs of so-called savages. Instead, there was a focus
on the virtues of reason and progress. To publish short stories in the
newspapers was to preach the good word, to try to transform the world
(many publications one of which is still published in Lyon bore the
title of Progress). This may be what makes the classic short story so very
much a product of its time: its positivist belief in the virtues of education in
the simplest possible terms.
12. Conclusion to Part III: Are

Dostoevskys Short Stories
Polyphonic?
We have seen in Part III that the classic short story is a resolutely monologic
genre, in which only the author-reader group has a fully-fledged voice of
its own. Every possible rhetorical technique is used to distance the characters
from the reader. The primary focus is on the characters difference, their
exotic strangeness, and the result is that the reader judges their voice even
before it has been heard. To conclude this section we should, then, return
to Mikhail Bakhtin in order to justify the use I have made of the notion of
polyphony. Actually, I find that I have gone in a direction not explicitly
foreseen by Bakhtin: when he developed the concept, it was for the purpose
of contrasting Dostoevsky with all other writers, and the difference between
novels and short stories was not one of his concerns.1 However, it seems to
me that we can and should pursue the analysis of Bakhtin in the terms
that he himself set. If we are attentive to the development of his arguments
in Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics it is clear that he talks of Dostoevskys
short works and novels quite differently. This should lead us to make a
1
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.12
distinction that is as important as it is seldom made, between polyphony

and dialogism.
First of all let us note that Bakhtin explicitly states the difference between
novels and short stories: Other autonomous consciousnesses appear only
in the longer novels.2 The movement towards polyphony, characteristic
of Dostoevsky, is not fully realised in the short stories: the other is not
seen as having a full and autonomous status. Since Bakhtins goal is not to
distinguish the different facets of his author, but to indicate his true place
in world literature, the fact that he does not make a point of developing
this distinction between the genres is not surprising. That he happened to
remark on this, however, is because all the analyses he gives of short stories
pointed to it. The difference between the novels and the short stories can be
said as a difference between polyphony and dialogism.
Polyphony, as put to light by Bakhtin in Dostoevskys novels, is when the
relationships between all the voices are based on equality.3 To take a classic
example, in The Brothers Karamazov, when Alyosha says to Ivan Karamazov:
You are not the one who killed our father, Alyoshas voice has the same
status as the voice of the Devil who persuades Ivan that he is guilty. Alyosha
makes this assertion to balance that of Satan, and the whole construction
by Dostoevsky of the character of Alyosha makes this equilibrium valid.4
Similarly, in The Idiot, it is impossible to despise Rogozhin, because of his
rival Myshkins attitude towards him. As the characters interact with one
another, all the typifying traits given at the beginning of the book are
steadily deconstructed as are the readers prejudices, which would lead
him to think of Sonya in Crime and Punishment as a prostitute. Everything
in these novels makes it impossible for the reader to pass a judgement on
the characters. Renouncing this means to renounce social prejudices: to
renounce taking a position of superiority toward other social categories,
genders or races. This is polyphony, a plurality of consciousnesses, with
equal rights, where the characters word about himself and his world
[] sounds, as it were, alongside the authors word and in a special way
combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other
characters.5
2
Ibid, p. 267, note 16. See also p. 220: But these voices [in The Double] have not yet become
fully independent real voices, they are not yet three autonomous consciousnesses. This
occurs only in Dostoevskys longer novels.
3
Ibid, pp. 5-6.
4
See ibid, pp. 255-26.
5
Ibid, respectively p. 6 and p. 7.
Conclusion to Part III185
Now, dialogism in Dostoevskys short stories is quite distinct from this.

Bakhtin similarly puts to light two voices, but here he is not talking about
the symmetry or variety of voices of equivalent status. It is dialogism
because the relationship between narrator and character is a direct one, a
dialogue. Here too Dostoevskys heroes are consciousnesses, fully and
constantly aware of everything that can be said of them, of every comment
or judgement that could be developed about them. Their major trait could
even be said to be this sideward glance by which they are always in
search of the other characters assessment of them both materially and
ethically.6 The characters are in a relationship of dialogue with the narrator,
who does not have the last word on them: the narrator cannot give a definite
picture of them from an exterior perspective. But this is not polyphony
because there is, in fact, a hierarchy between two totally dissimilar partners
in the communication process, with one of them the character being
discredited. Bakhtin continues to speak of two voices, but they are in no
way equal.
In the short stories dialogism, the first voice is that of the heros selfjustification. But and Bakhtin insists on this it has no real autonomy,
nor any ontological weight. Neither the heroes of the underground,
nor the hero of Dvoinik (The Double), nor of Krotkaya (The Meek One) will
be able to persuade the other or themselves that they are right and that
the outside world is wrong. And never will some other voice speak about
them a truth that would balance the condemnation they are passing on
themselves.7 If we try to adhere strictly to Bakhtins terms, we are forced
to conclude as he himself usually does that ultimately it is the others
truth which dominates, crushing that of the hero. The heroes of the
underground can never make their own voice seem valid, even to their
own ears. In other words, the monologue wins out over the dialogue and
the character admits defeat. Even for Dostoevsky, an author who puts
polyphony at the foundation of his fictional universe, the short stories
are incapable of giving the hero a separate voice that would be equal to
that of the narrator. Although in Dostoevskys stories too there is intense
anticipation of anothers words through the process of dialogism, this
6
Ibid, p. 196.
7
As did Myshkins voice in The Idiot, when he forcefully affirms to Nastassia Filipovna:
Arent you ashamed? Surely you are not what you are pretending to be now? it isnt
possible!; to which she replies I really am not like this, he is right. Quoted in ibid, p.
242.
theoretical orientation towards anothers discourse is not exploited so as

to give him a full narrative and ontological status.8
The short story, admittedly, is not alone in this respect. To illustrate my
thesis, I propose to imagine an axis. At one end are Dostoevskys novels,
which allow each of his characters a totally valid voice. Here there is a
radical absence of judgement, no value wins out definitively and a priori
over the others; Dostoevsky favours proximity with the character, even if
he is debauched, impious or murderous. He allows us to see him a novo,
in a light freed from all prejudices. At the other extreme of the axis is the
classic short story, which refuses to enter to any degree into the logic of
its characters; which almost always discredits their vision of the world,
and always favours the external viewpoint; which increases distance, even
in those rare cases when it is used to extol the merits of a great man.
Between the two extremes are both the other novels of western literature
and short fiction.
These other novels of the western tradition, according to Bakhtin, are not
polyphonic. But although they usually define a non-polyphonic hierarchy,
with a hero whose voice has fuller status than that of his protagonists, this
hero is not himself systematically distanced from the reader as he is in the
classic short story.9 For example, the secondary characters in Maupassants
novel Une vie (A Life) are treated as caricatures. The heroines parents, her
husband, the priest, the elderly aunt, could all be short story characters
(as is in effect the case with the aunt in Clair de lune [In The Moonlight], and
the priest in Le Saut du berger [The Shepherds Leap]). But the heroine Jeanne
herself is not. The lack of distance from Jeanne is all the more remarkable
because the portraits of women and the treatment of love in Maupassants
short stories are so deeply lacking nuance; here, Maupassant achieved for
this heroine something he never did for his short stories characters.
Another intermediary form between the novel and the classic short
story is short fiction from Nathaniel Hawthornes tales to the modern,
non-narrative story. Short fiction is epiphanic and suggestive. Renouncing
the anecdote, it moves beyond the narrowly prescribed outlook on society
and characters that make the classic short story monologic, and it is much
nearer on the axis to Dostoevskys novels. As an epilogue to this study, I
will briefly look at how the genre moved from one end of the axis to the
other.
8
Ibid, pp. 205 and 193.
9
At the end of his life, Bakhtin abandoned the idea that Dostoevsky is the only
representative of polyphony in a western novel that is totally monological; and he does
allow for gradations.
Epilogue: Beyond the Classic

Short Story
The title of this book has given a chronological indication: 1870-1925, the
period that represents the heyday for the classic short story. Before
1870, or rather at the beginning of the nineteenth century, short stories
had a very different form, for example those of Nathaniel Hawthorne.1
After 1920, there emerged a new type of short story that renounced all the
characteristic traits we have described. Classic short stories continued to be
written and continued to sell but beside them the twentieth century
saw the rise of something quite different, which corresponds to what Clare
Hanson calls short fiction, and which she has showed to be linked with
the advent of Modernism.2 Structure was no longer based on antithesis or
even paroxysms, and the distant look at the subject completely disappeared,
1
See Mary Rohrberger, Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story (The Hague: Mouton, 1966);
and Mary Rohrberger, Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story:
How I Got Hooked on the Short Story and Where It Led Me, in The Art of Brevity:
Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and
Hans H. Skei (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 3-13. On
Rohrbergers influence on recent criticism, see for example Susan Lohafer, Introduction,
Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge,
LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
2
Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (New York: St. Martins Press,
1985), pp. 1-9.
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0039.13
together with the authors and readers superior attitudes; monologism

was no longer a standard feature.
This transition between the classic short story and what I call the
new modern form started in the very corpus of work we have been
investigating. The authors we have analysed, who practiced the classic
form with extraordinary success, also published texts that can be taken as
heralds of the new form. To finish this book, I shall describe two types of
stories lengthy stories and fantastic tales that led to the emergence
of this new type of short fiction, and explore in more detail the work of
authors that sat at the crossroads between the classic and modern short
story.
Lengthy stories: the long Yvette after the brief Yveline

Among the classic short stories of the time, the lengthy stories are quite
special. Of course, not all lengthy stories are exceptions to the classic
rule of monologism, but in certain cases the long short story repudiates
the classic format, in that it foregoes both the strong structure of antithesis
and the exotic perspective.3 Lengthy stories or novellas can be said to
dilute the narrative, and the change in length then changes everything.
Guy de Maupassants Yvette is a telling example, as we can compare it with
a classic short story previously written by Maupassant on the same subject,
the briefer Yveline Samoris.4 Both texts tell the story of a girl (Yveline who
becomes Yvette in the long story), the daughter of a demimondaine, one
of the high class prostitutes of nineteenth-century Paris who pretended to
be aristocrats, and entertained wealthy men who joined in the illusion. The
girl is very young and nave, taking people at face value, living a free, gay
life in what she thinks is a real salon. Srigny, a newcomer to her mothers
3
Examples of longer stories that retain a classic monologism and that we have been
able to use as examples of the classic format include Chekhovs Skuchnaya istoriya (A
Boring Story) and Poprygunya (The Grasshopper), as well as Henry Jamess Daisy Miller,
The Figure in the Carpet and The Beast in the Jungle.
4
A translation of the briefer Yveline Samoris, titled Yvette Samoris, is on Project
Gutenberg
http://archive.org/stream/completeoriginal03090gut/old/gm00v11.txt
(accessed 16/10/2013). For the original French text, see Guy de Maupassant, Contes
et nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pliade,
1974), I, pp. 684-88 (hereafter Pliade). The longer Yvette can be found in Guy de
Maupassant, Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, trans. by Artine Artinian
(Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955), pp. 104-48 (hereafter Artinian). For the
original French text, see Pliade, II, pp. 234-307.
Epilogue189
house, is attracted to Yveline/Yvette but cannot decide whether he should

seduce her.
In the brief story, Yveline Samoris, the antithetical tension established
between the two contrasting images of the young woman provides, as
usual, a strong structure. Srigny is trying to decipher a riddle: is Yveline/
Yvette totally, absolutely corrupt or totally, absolutely innocent?5 The
ending will prove that she was, in fact, totally innocent; when she realises
what is going on in her mothers house she finds herself caught between
two equally unbearable (and equally paroxystic) possibilities: living with
Srigny, whom she has come to love, and leading a corrupt life; or sticking
to her ideals and renouncing him.
Her answer a typical answer in classic short stories (see, for example,
Agathas decision in Henry Jamess The Modern Warning, discussed in
Chapter Eleven) is to commit suicide. Distance from the subject takes on
the very familiar form of satire of this all too worldly world. The twist-in-thetail strengthens both the distancing and the powerful effect of the anecdote
by forcing the clash between the two antithetical poles of innocence and
corruption. The debased society around her refuses to learn from this act
of desperation, and her death is officially attributed to an accident caused
by a faulty furnace. We have here a particularly vivid display of the traits
encountered throughout this study. The characters are not only distanced
from the reader, they are straightforward types; not only what we have
called objective types (social or psychological roles which the reader
has already met or heard about), but this time clear literary types: the
coquette, the libertine and the ingnue.
In the lengthy short story, Yvette, little is left of these typical features.
When reworking his tale into a seventy-page novella, Maupassant abandons
nearly everything that made it so classic a short story. The antithesis and
the paroxysms on which it was based disappear. Already by the end of the
third chapter, the riddle (corrupt or innocent?) is solved, because we enter
into the mind of Yvette and discover that she is neither one nor the other.
From then on, the text no longer plays with contradictory ideas either
harlot or virgin but dwells on a world vision that is complex, ambiguous
and still truly unformed. From this point of view, the scene in the riverside
5
At the beginning of the longer tale, Srigny says of Yvette: She provokes me and excites
me like a harlot, and guards herself at the same time as though she were a virgin []
Sometimes I imagine that she has as many lovers as her mother. Sometimes I think that
she knows nothing about life, absolutely nothing. Artinian, p. 107 (Pliade, II, p. 239).
caf, that takes place in the novella but not the short story, is extremely
important. The young woman swims beside Srigny, happy to let him see
her body a completely sensual yet innocent happiness because she is
only conscious of the moment and not of what this sight might arouse in
him.6 The story no longer bears the stamp of the dilemma; the suicide is no
longer the natural solution to a narrative situation which is no longer set in
terms of irreducible contrasts. Yvette will live amid contradictions.
The consequences of this reworking of the material are not minor.
Length has been used to develop hidden potentialities in the subject in a
way that contrasts with the usual short story format. In this novella, the
heroine is no longer in the least strange or foreign, and she has a full and
autonomous voice. We are finally with the character, whose initially
strange qualities are superseded by a truly profound perspective of her.
Fantastic tales: the deconstruction of the self

Fantastic tales (especially those dealing with madness), even more than
lengthy short stories, could be seen as the missing link, the step that took
the genre from its classic to modern format. Here, the narrative is not
diluted (as it is in lengthy stories or novellas) but rather fragmented, in
order to portray an unexpected mental universe. Throughout this study,
we have seen that fantastic tales used the same material as other classic
short stories, but in their own way. Like the classic short story, they present
the reader with an unquestionably strange world; but at the same time
they exceed the restraints of the framework because they try to let us
penetrate a different logic. To be successful, these stories must achieve a
sort of quivering of meaning: that oscillation of the readers belief between
the possible and the impossible, between what is rational and what is not.
The fantastic narrative entices us to participate for a few moments in a
strange world, or, in the case of tales of madness, in an unfamiliar way of
thinking. In the latter case, the whole point rests in the display of a sick
mind as a somewhat viable perspective on the world. Contrary to the
realistic classic short stories, which painstakingly build and strengthen the
distance between the spectacle and the reader, these tales will try to lessen
that distance.7 In the fantastic story, the reader can no longer be sure of
6
Ibid, p. 124 (pp. 267-68).
7
To take a simple example: when the character could appear to us as a coward, the
narrator (or the reflector) quickly shows that their fear is more than understandable
Epilogue191
anything, and is unable to occupy the usual comfortable and clear position
he was granted in the classic short story.
These fantastic tales retain the structural features of the classic short
story, but only in order to rework them along these new lines. For example,
they do not hesitate to use the tools that accelerate the readers entry
into the narrative. We see in them antitheses, quasi-abstract entities, and
sometimes even character types. Yet these usual short story devices led
to a dramatically different outlook when used in fantastic stories: they
participate in arousing an emotion in us rather than simply conveying an
anecdote. The paroxysms, for example, are used for their thematic presence,
and contribute to establishing a world different from ours. Unlike classic
shorty stories, in which these devices are so inconspicuous that they mostly
go unnoticed, the fantastic story makes the reader oversensitive to them,
destabilising his relationship to the text. What has been destroyed is the
fundamental ground on which the classic short story was built: that of the
readers certainties.
We saw, throughout the analyses in Part III, that the reader is invited in
classic short stories to look upon a profoundly different world. Whether
they laugh at the characters, or pity them, or denounce their customs, the
readers do so from the position of superiority, for example that of one who
knows they could introduce the characters to progress. However, readers
can only do this when their belief in themselves and the correct path are
strong and unshaking. Stories about madness, of which Maupassant wrote
many, challenge our belief in a rational and stable subject. These stories
prepare the transition to the new concept of the short story that will emerge
in the twentieth century, in which all guidelines will be abolished, and
author and reader will no longer be sure of their correctly understanding
the world.
Authors at a crossroads
Most of the great authors studied here are also in themselves embodying
this transition. Maupassant is one of the major links in the deconstruction
of the classic short story: he wrote both lengthy short stories and fantastic
tales. His well-known interest in the pathological states of consciousness
it is absolutely normal and that we, too, would have reacted in the same way. See,
for example, Maupassants La Peur (Pliade, I, pp. 600-06) or Lui? (Pliade, I, pp. 869-75).
This type of empathy is never evoked in the realistic classic short story.
and his mastery of the oscillation of meaning were at odds with the neat and
effective exotic story. Other major authors who were masters of the classic
short story particularly Akutagawa Rynosuke, Anton Chekhov, Luigi
Pirandello and Giovanni Verga, as we shall see below also embodied the
transition from one form to the other.
My first goal in studying Akutagawa along with the European authors
was to put my structural hypotheses to the test: if stories written in
dramatically different circumstances showed the same features, then
we could start to generalise about generic conventions. And indeed, in a
country with a very different tradition from that of the West, where length
has never been considered important as a criterion, we have met with this
classic form of the short story, of which most of Akutagawas texts, from
Mikan (The Tangerines) to Kareno sh (Withered Fields) or Hana (The Nose),
could be taken as canonical examples.8 But Akutagawa is also acclaimed
as a master of what we are accustomed to call the modern short story.
As a writer of both kinds of texts from 1914 on, Akutagawa proves that the
evolution towards short fiction does not result from the creative personality
of the author, nor from an automatic, historic evolution.9
Tales of madness are again an essential link. Akutagawa writes
formless texts that are often akin to those of the stream of consciousness
mode of writing. The one unifying principle tends to be the actual mind it
comes from; for example, that of the dwarf in Shuju no kotoba (The Words
of a Dwarf), or that of the young man Akutagawa in the autobiographical
Aru h no issh (The Life of an Idiot). Even when they follow the chronological
order of events, as in Haguruma (The Gears), the outcome is dramatically
different from that of the classic short stories. Paroxysms are rare, and
8
As we saw earlier, the Japanese did not have a special word for short story prior to
the last years of the nineteenth century. Up to that time, the same word, monogatari, was
used indifferently: for the Genji monogatari and its thousands of pages, as well as for Ueda
Akinaris Ugetsu monogatari, tales of a few pages each. Even at the end of the nineteenth
century, when the increasing influence of western culture brought about new trends
in Japanese literature, the emerging modern literature was slow to pay attention to the
criterion of length. The word chosen to name the new-born novel shsetsu was
made up of the two sino-Japanese characters for short (sh) and story or apologue
(setsu), although the works in question, such as Futabatei Shimeis programmatic
Ukigumo (Floating Cloud), were often full-length novels. The specific word for short
story, tanpen shsetsu, was created later in response to the multitudinous translations of
western short stories, by adding tanpen (brief) to shsetsu. By the second quarter of the
twentieth century, this new word was widely used.
9
The narrative short story in its most classic form did not disappear; many stories by Joyce
Carol Oates, Isaac B. Singer or Nina Berberova are, to my mind, absolutely classic.
Epilogue193
when they appear occasionally, they are never used to build a strong
structure. Nothing is resolved at the end of these texts; in fact, no tension
will have been created that could lead to a resolution, let alone a twistin-the-tail. We are invited to penetrate the erratic way of thinking rather
than contemplating it from afar. One could stress Akutagawas links with
Japanese literary traditions.10 But this should not overshadow the fact that
he is also sharing in the essential preoccupation of writers around the
world at that time: the deconstruction of the self, and doubt about reasons
grasp of reality.
Moreover, Akutagawa had begun writing with another kind of nonnarrative text: the lyrical story, which also had much in common with
those of American or European authors of the time.11 These lyrical stories
also rejected the dominance of the anecdote, and they originated at a very
early point in Akutagawas career: gawa no mizu (The Rivers Water) and
Shis (The Shadow) were both written when he was still a student. Again
these stories share few of the features that characterise his classic narrative
stories. A good example is one of Akutagawas most beautiful tales, Bisei
no shin (The Faith of Wei Cheng), in which a man, waiting on a river bank for
a woman who never comes, is finally drowned by the rising tide.12 What
is striking is that this most unusual situation of a man not trying to escape
imminent drowning is not portrayed as strange or uncommon. Even the
waiting is not made to seem extraordinary. And neither the water nor the
landscape is characterised by any particular tension: there is no paroxystic
treatment of the elements here and, as a consequence, no antithesis will
emerge. However, unlike most stream of consciousness stories, this text
has a strong structure; but it is a structure very similar to that of the musical
rondo, with a refrain: Onna wa imada ni konai (But the lady still does
not come). The effect it produces is closer to that of music or poetry than
prose. Nothing in this is reminiscent of the tightly-wound narratives we
saw earlier in this book; yet neither is it formless.
10 For example, with the zuihitsu the following the brush essay a form illustrated
in the thirteenth century by Kamo no Chmeis Hjki (An Account of My Hut) or in the
fourteenth century by Yoshida Kenks Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) and practiced
by Akutagawa himself.
11 On this topic, see for example Eileen Baldeshwiler, The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch
of a History, in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1994), pp. 231-41.
12 Akutagawa, Rynosuke, Akutagawa Rynosuke zensh, 19 vols (Tky: Iwanami Shoten,
1954-1955), IV, pp. 44-46. There are no published translations that I know of.
Chekhov is perhaps an even more obvious example of the move to

short fiction or the modern short story many critics see him primarily
as an author of this latter type of writing. However, I would argue that he
only wrote a few stories in this mode, generally at the end of his career;
most of his stories were perfectly classic.13 That is part of the reason why I
think that a study of the classic short story is necessary: far from being only
a form for minor or inexperienced writers, it was the core practice for most
writers at the end of the nineteenth century. Chekhov was interested in the
idea of progress and satire, both of which could be illustrated effectively
in the classic short story format. Neither The Mujiks nor Enemies, nor of
course The Death of a Civil Servant nor Gooseberries could be described in
the terms generally used for speaking of Chekhov as a writer of nuance
and complexity. This, of course, does not mean that the usual criticism
on his work does not hold true; only that we need to recognise his other
modes of writing. What makes Chekhov so great is the way he was able to
use the classic form and go beyond it. The same could be said of the other
authors studied here. I have been able to use Chekhovs Lady with Lapdog
to illustrate many points of the classic short story format, although this is a
favourite story for the criticism interested in the (hyphened) short-story
to use Brander Matthews term for the modern short story which for
its part insists on epiphany.14
One will not be surprised that, for Pirandello, the advent of the
dramatic form breeds this motion out of the short story format. Quando
si comprende (War) begins as a classic short story indeed.15 In its opening
scene, a bereaved mother is literally hauled up into the rail wagon by her
husband; she is reified, assimilated to a parcel.16 Everything in the scene is
grotesque. And then, something completely different emerges when the
characters begin to communicate with each other in a dramatic dialogue.
13 Chekhovs modern stories include The Bishop (1902) and The Bride (1903).
14 Brander Matthews proposed to use the term short-story to describe the story that does
not only happen to be short, but uses brevity itself as the means of saying more. Brander
Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-story (New York: Longmans, Green and Company,
1901).
15 An abridged translation is available in Ruth Spack, The International Story: An Anthology
with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), pp. 74-77 (hereafter Spack). For the original Italian text, see Luigi Pirandello,
Donna Mimma (Milan: Mondadori, 1951), pp. 66-70 (hereafter Pirandello).
16 The translation reads: a bulky woman in deep mourning was hosted in almost like a
shapeless bundle (Spack, p. 74). In a paragraph not translated: il pesante fardello is the
heavy bundle (Pirandello, p. 66).
Epilogue195
Suddenly, the characters cease to be ridiculous and pitiful. That the story is
called in Italian When one understands reminds us this is all a question
of renouncing the prejudices we bring to the reading and of re-working the
distance usual to the format, to let the characters get a full voice.
It is the same situation with Verga. Leo Spitzer, in his study of Vergas I
Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), insisted exactly on this emergence
of a full voice for the characters. As we saw in Chapter Nine, the decision
of narrating the novel through the eyes and words of one of the characters
(the device of regression) is a means of hearing their truth, different from
ours. But we saw also that the same device in the stories is a means of
exoticism.17 Here again, presence or absence of the anecdote seems to be
the dividing line: The House by the Medlar Tree tells nothing, it only has
us enter more and more profoundly in a world distinct from ours, and lose
on the way our preconceptions. It is not a question of an authors ripening
mastery of his art. The House by the Medlar Tree dates from 1881, roughly the
same time as his great short story cycles.18
******
Such an evolution represents the unravelling of the very form of the classic
short story. Boundaries with other genres become blurred. The traits that
firmly characterised the short story at the end of the nineteenth century
disappear and are not replaced by anything half so clear. Instead of a few
structuring traits, the new modern stories showed a variety of features
that had little in common with one another. Of course, rhetorical devices
were multifarious in the classic short story, but, as we saw, this variety was
superficial: the genre relied on a few constant principles. These in-depth
features meant that the surface traits did not have to be repetitive. Readers
knew a short story when they saw one, and never hesitated to label a text
as a short story except in a few lengthy examples. The new form is not so
17 With the exception of Libert (Liberty), a non-narrative tale, which describes the
movements of a mob in a popular revolt in 1860. On this story see, for example,
Leonardo Sciascia, La corda pazza (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), pp. 79-94; and Giuseppe Lo
Castro, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Saggi brevi di letteratura antica e moderna, 5
(Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001), pp. 139-40.
18 The classic short story Nedda was published in 1874; the (classic) cycles Primavera e
altri racconti (Spring and Other Stories) in 1877; Vita dei campi (Life in the Fields) in 1880;
and Novelle rusticane (Little Novels of Sicily) in 1883. Vergas later novel Mastro Don
Gesualdo (Master Gesualdo), published in 1889, has always been considered to be much
less innovating than The House by the Medlar Tree. See Luigi Russo, Giovanni Verga (Bari:
Laterza, 1941).
clearly discernible, as is obvious from the very wide use of the term short
fiction to speak of short stories as well as of other genres. Short texts are
considered fiction like any other: lyrical stories sometimes verging on the
prose poem, but also short works resembling theatre, as exemplified by
Akutagawa on the one hand and Pirandello on the other. By renouncing
the classic way of telling stories which had met with such success in the
end of the nineteenth century, the genre in its new form joins with other
genres to conquer new territories of the mind: polyphony and stream of
consciousness rather than anecdote and monologism. What made the
authors we have seen so great is that they knew not to stop at the perfect
form that they had contributed to shape, but saw beyond it and could
in the same years use and renounce its major features and its somewhat
awesome efficacy.
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Index
Achebe, Chinua 113, 117, 137, 138, 140,

163
Akutagawa, Rynosuke 4, 31, 33, 74,
87, 119, 173174, 192193, 196
Brigands, The (Cht) 110, 124
Faith of Wei Cheng, The (Bisei no shin)
193
Tangerines, The (Mikan) 3132, 174,
192
Withered Fields (Kareno sh) 33, 56, 192
Yam Gruel (Imogayu) 121, 173
Bakhtin, Mikhail 39, 78, 118, 138, 165,
183
Barthes, Roland 76, 77
bestial imagery (comparisons between
humans and animals) 90, 108, 109,
111, 121, 142, 145, 177
Bierce, Ambrose 57, 87, 176
Booth, Wayne C. 122, 123, 132, 143, 155
Capuana, Luigi 16, 41, 75, 86
character types 8, 26, 56, 57, 59, 65, 69,
73, 74, 90, 105, 106, 109, 119, 124,
136, 142, 168, 189
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 4, 5, 7,
14, 16, 22, 36, 44, 45, 47, 52, 57, 58,
60, 85, 88, 98, 119, 127, 146, 163,
166169, 174, 179, 194
Anyuta 174, 179
Big Volodya and Little Volodya (Volodya

bolshoy i Volodya malenkii) 35
Boring Story, A (Skuchnaya istoriia) 22
Death of a Civil Servant, The (Smert
chinovnika) 119120
Enemies (Vragi ) 166169
Grasshopper, The (Poprigunia) 47
In Exile (V ssylke) 104
Lady with Lapdog (Dama s sobachkoi) 6,
5253, 6062, 194
Misery (Toska) 45
Peasants (Muzhiki) 146, 161, 163, 164,
180
class 46, 90, 95, 97, 99, 120, 123, 135, 144
Conrad, Joseph 87
Heart of Darkness 113, 137
Crane, Stephen 59, 87
cycles and sequences of short stories 6,
6465, 66, 151, 195
dialect 9, 119, 134, 140, 143147, 157, 178
dialogism 184186
dialogue 137152 (Ch. 9), 185, 194195
dilemma 8, 165172, 190
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 9, 30, 165, 166,
183186 (Ch. 12)
Brothers karamazov, The (Bratya
Karamazovy) 166, 184
Double, The (Dvoinik) 184, 185

Idiot, The (Idiot) 166, 184, 185
Meek One, The (Krotkaya) 185
Eikhenbaum, Boris 28, 59, 172173
emotion 9, 20, 24, 33, 38, 41, 45, 54, 66,
79, 103, 104, 125, 165182 (Ch. 11),
191
ending with a twist 4354 (Ch. 3), 189
Et, Jun 155156
exoticism 7, 58, 83100 (Ch. 6),
102103, 107108, 112, 119, 122,
134135, 148, 150, 172, 179, 180, 183,
188, 192, 195
fait-divers 7576
fantastic, the 2426, 4950, 51, 66,
8788, 118, 125, 136, 158159, 160,
188, 190191
Faulkner, William 66
Flaubert, Gustave 56, 62, 111112, 142,
143
Saint Julien the Hospitalier (Saint Julien
lHospitalier) 56
foreign terms in short stories 89, 138,
147151
Genette, Grard 77, 7879, 139,
154155, 156
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 14, 16,
19
Novella (Novelle) 19, 37, 74
Gogol, Nikolai 74, 119, 172173, 174
The Overcoat (Shinel) 172173
Hanson, Clare 4, 5, 70, 75, 117, 187
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 3, 4, 61, 75, 79,
186
Twice Told Tales 44, 79
Hills, Rust 26
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 74
hypotyposis 61, 73, 111, 129
intellectual journals 7, 8, 58, 9192. See
alsonewspapers and periodicals
irony 35, 36, 47, 48, 99, 117, 122, 124,
134, 139, 143, 155, 156
James, Henry 4, 6, 38, 57, 66, 71, 78, 85,
87, 88, 92, 96, 101, 103, 104, 132, 148,
153, 162, 170
Ambassadors, The 40
Aspern Papers, The 70
At Isella 105
Beast in the Jungle, The 32, 67
Daisy Miller 105, 160, 170
Figure in the Carpet, The 6, 19, 58
Fordham Castle 133
Golden Bowl, The 70, 170, 171
Great Good Place, The 132
International Episode,An 103, 172
London Life, A 106
Madame de Mauves 105
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie 170
Modern Warning, The 171, 189
Private Life, The 132
Thodolinde/Rose-Agathe 105, 147
Travelling Companions 104
Turn of the Screw, The 49, 98, 159
Wings of the Dove, The 71
Japanese script, European words
quoted within 148150, Fig. 1
Joyce, James 4, 5, 49, 62, 74, 88, 9395,
157, 192
Dead, The 49, 53
Dubliners 6566, 93, 95, 9798, 118
Ulysses 157
Kataev, Vladimir 37, 128, 129, 130
Kipling, Rudyard 7, 57, 87, 92
Plain Tales From the Hills 64, 92
Lenin, Vladimir 175, 180
Leskov, Nikolai 5
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
(Ledi Makbet mtsesnkogo uezda) 56
Levy, Andrew 91, 93, 117, 163
Luperini, Romano 5960, 78, 142, 143
Mansfield, Katherine 44, 98
Maupassant, Guy de 4, 6, 7, 8, 44, 58,
74, 86, 87, 88, 91, 97, 99, 101, 110,
111, 118, 120, 124, 134, 186, 191
Adventure in Paris, An (Une Aventure
parisienne) 122
Allouma 106, 113, 121
Apple Turnovers/The Old Man (Les
Douillons/Le Vieux) 176
Ball of Fat (Boule de suif) 6970

Boitelle 97, 134
Christening, The (Le Baptme) 180
Confession, The (La Confession) 38
Corsican Bandit, The (Un bandit corse)
102
Enthusiast, An (Le Rosier de Mme
Husson) 62
Family Affair, A (En famille) 120, 123
Life, A (Une vie) 186
Miss Harriet 124
My Uncle Jules (Mon Oncle Jules) 97,
162, 166
Necklace, The (La Parure) 46
Odd Feast, An (Le Rveillon) 143
On the River (Sur lEau) 24, 50, 66
Strange Fancy, A (La Rempailleuse) 126
True Story, A (Un drame vrai) 38
Yvette/Yveline Samoris 188
May, Charles E. 3, 5, 52, 53, 118
Melville, Herman 57, 87
Bartleby, The Scrivener 156
modern short stories (short fiction) 4,
9, 44, 55, 64, 118, 127, 186, 187
monologism 9, 118, 165, 173, 183, 186,
188, 196
Mori, gai 4, 6, 35, 56, 87, 110, 118
Hanako 131132, 148150, 160, Fig. 1
The Dancing Girl (Maihime) 35, 110
narrator, the 9, 29, 47, 62, 66, 70, 71, 98,
103, 106, 109, 121, 125127, 130, 138,
153, 165, 169, 185
Naturalism 5, 7, 1314, 58, 83, 85, 92,
118
Verism (Italian Naturalist Movement)
13, 16
nature (beauty of) 25, 50, 103, 104, 107,
112, 130, 169
newspapers and periodicals 7, 8, 44,
58, 75, 84, 88, 99, 101, 109, 131, 134,
136, 157, 181
Echo de Paris 109, 134, 135
Fanfulla 86, 89, 117
Gaulois, Le 50, 86, 88, 91, 95, 97, 117,
122, 126, 136, 179
Gil Blas 86, 88, 97, 99, 120, 123, 126,
127, 136, 145, 146
Index209
Irish Homestead, The 9395
New Yorker 91
Novoe vremya 86, 129
Nuova rivista 92
Progrs, Le 7
Revue hebdomadaire, La 96
Russkaya mysl 91, 92
Severny Vestnik 91, 92
Vsemirnaya Illustratsiya 91, 104
Zhizn 92
novella, the 188190
novel, the 26, 40, 55, 60, 61, 63, 71, 76,
78, 102, 109, 140, 153, 165, 170, 183,
186, 195
OFaolain, Sean 59, 60, 74
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
2829, 47, 74
The Gift of the Magi 28, 58
paroxysm 6, 9, 1326 (Ch.1), 27, 32, 38,
45, 46, 50, 53, 63, 67, 73, 121, 129,
146, 169, 173, 175, 189, 191, 192
peasants, representation of 8, 16, 58,
88, 90, 91, 99100, 110, 112, 121, 132,
134, 140, 143, 161, 163, 176, 178180
Pirandello, Luigi 4, 5, 6, 85, 88, 118,
121, 124, 141, 192, 194, 196
Sicilian Limetrees (Lumie di Sicilia) 124
War (Quando si comprende) 194
Poe, Edgar Allan 14, 44, 74, 79
point of view 50, 90, 106, 140, 154, 160,
185, 186, 187, 190
Sirius point of view 160, 179
political awareness 88, 92, 129, 179
polyphony 9, 118, 137, 143, 165166,
168, 183186 (Ch. 12), 196. See
alsoBakhtin, Mikhail
postcolonial theory 103, 117, 150, 163,
180. See alsoSaid, Edward W.
preconstructed material 8, 55, 56, 73
progress, nineteenth-century belief in
7, 9, 180, 181, 191, 194
Proust, Marcel 79, 93, 95
provincial characters 8, 58, 61, 8891,
97, 120, 122, 124, 126, 133, 173174
race 106, 134, 137, 184

reader, the 5, 7, 15, 21, 25, 29, 44, 46, 49,
51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 64, 65, 74, 76, 77,
83, 86, 87, 90, 91, 9293, 98, 101, 103,
106, 109, 111, 153
reflector, the 9, 153, 165, 170, 176
retroreading 47
Rodin, Auguste 131, 150, 160
Rohrberger, Mary 3, 5, 118, 187
Russo, Luigi 6, 16, 138, 141
Said, Edward W. 103
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail 5
satire 65, 91, 96, 118119, 127, 129, 159,
165, 189, 194
Schnitzler, Arthur 157158, 163
Lieutenant Gustl 157, 163
serials 7, 7577, 84, 99, 135
speech (direct and indirect) 9, 137144,
177178
Spitzer, Leo 6, 143, 195
Stevenson, Robert Louis 27, 83, 87
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
8, 2728, 32, 58, 70
suicide 171, 189
Swift, Jonathan 160
Gullivers Travels 159
symmetry 5, 28, 31, 35, 167, 185
Tieck, Ludwig 30, 32, 79
Todorov, Tzvetan 49, 59, 77
Tolstoy, Leo 15, 25, 160, 163, 175
Anna Karenina 67
Kholstomer 159, 179
tolstye zhurnaly (Russian thick
journals) 7, 91. See alsonewspapers
and periodicals
travelogues 8, 85, 101
Verga, Giovanni 5, 7, 14, 23, 58, 74, 86,
88, 89, 91, 99, 110, 138, 139, 140143,
162, 180, 192. See alsoVerism
Gramignas Mistress (LAmante di
Gramigna) 1520, 29, 31, 53, 58, 139,
141
Life in the Fields (Vita dei campi) 86, 141
Nedda 174, 195
Pentolaccia 90
Rosso Malpelo 142, 143, 174
The House by the Medlar Tree (I

Malavoglia) 41, 140, 141, 142143,
195
Verism SeeNaturalism
Voloshinov, Valentin 138140, 143
Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) 160
Micromegas 159, 160
Wendepunkt 30, 32, 79
women, representation of 99, 104, 107,
118, 122, 124, 126, 186
Zola, mile 5, 7, 13, 15, 86
Experimental Novel, The (Le Roman
experimental) 13, 15
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THE CLASSIC SHORT STORY

The Classic Short Story,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

To my parents, Janine and Roger Bressand-Saureil.

This book is a fully revised and updated translation, by Yvonne Freccero

4The Classic Short Story

E. May put together a collection of essays that made him a powerful

story tradition is often dismissed, in one word, as pertaining only to the

6The Classic Short Story

8The Classic Short Story

At the end of the nineteenth century, through the influence of Naturalism,

14The Classic Short Story

16The Classic Short Story

words and Verga insists on this point it must renounce grandiloquent

desired bachelor in the village, nicknamed Tallow Candle because of his

This enlargement characterises all the signifying elements of the described

18The Classic Short Story

The mention of the telegraph contributes to the impression of universality:

20The Classic Short Story

22The Classic Short Story

One characteristic of the classic short story is that the paroxysm

This is tantamount to denying the gigantic task imposed on Corvick and

39 Edel, IX, p. 295.

The effect of these superlatives is sometimes reinforced by other means

As in Verga, the drive for extremes is indicated by superhuman comparisons.

42 Magarshack, p. 46 (emphases mine) (Nauka, VII, p. 251).

24The Classic Short Story

Extremes in the fantastic short story

enveloped me) is followed by the most marvelous, stupendous sight

49 Ibid, pp. 170 and 171 (pp. 56 and 58).

26The Classic Short Story

By the paroxystic characterisation we have just observed, the classic short

28The Classic Short Story

Jekyll and Mr Hyde is emblematic of this deep antithetical tension.1 In this

adding the second part, O. Henry creates a dramatic knot: by revealing

30The Classic Short Story

32The Classic Short Story

12 Kojima, p. 211 (p. 99).

34The Classic Short Story

The essential point is that the various revelations which occur to

17 Kojima, p. 302 (p. 210).

symmetry into complexity by simply noting as Akutagawa does when

Akutagawa returns ironically to the vulgate: the boundless grief is exactly

36The Classic Short Story

24 Goethes Novelle is profoundly structured by the antithesis strength/gentleness,

38The Classic Short Story

a handful.28 Although he is rightly celebrated for the nuances in his plays,

Editing antithetic tension: Maupassant and James

The Confession is based on a similar idea of an unsolved murder finally

40The Classic Short Story

The second example is of a different order: it is a question of the

on the spot, with a volte-face, a wholly different inspiration.42 In the novel,

3. Ending with a Twist

A whole body of contemporary criticism is dedicated to the analysis and

44The Classic Short Story

genre. In his Philosophy of Composition (1846), an essay as famous as his

Ending with a Twist45

Having recognised the crucial importance of paroxystic characterisation

39 Edel, IX, p. 295.

42 Magarshack, p. 46 (emphases mine) (Nauka, VII, p. 251).

49 Ibid, pp. 170 and 171 (pp. 56 and 58).

17 Kojima, p. 302 (p. 210).

24 Goethes Novelle is profoundly structured by the antithesis strength/gentleness,

26 Ibid, p. 170 (p. 57).

34 Artinian, pp. 1-25 (Pliade, I, pp. 83-121).

12 Details of this survey can be found in Goyet (1990), available at http://rare.u-grenoble3.