Secret Life: The many facets of the short story
By Amber Duivenvoorden
Abraham Cahan maintains that Chekhov’s genius is best recognized in stories that are so “absolutely storyless that there is not enough even to fill a nutshell”. These short stories reveal only ‘a little piece of life’ and are the same kind of stories that fascinate me as a short story writer. What truly concerns me is the manipulation of mood and feeling, establishing a tone which mirrors the characters’ emotions and I found the short story to be the best medium in communicating this.
Chekhov was a master of this skill, expertly projecting emotion on landscape. In a story like “The Kiss”, Ryabovitch has been kissed, and everything appears differently, he ‘looks at the light and fancies that the light looks and winks at him, as though it knew about the kiss’. On returning to the village after some time, it becomes clear that he shall not see the woman again and although everything looks as it had when he’d first been kissed, there’s no ‘sound of the brave nightingale, and no scent of poplar and fresh grass.’ This projection of mood on the environment has worked its way in most of my stories.Valerie Shaw also sheds light on Chekhov’s mastery and comes to regard his stories as conforming to the form Virginia Woolf described as ‘a succession of emotions radiating from some character at the centre’. In these stories, everything comes from and returns to a ‘dynamic centre’ and ‘emotions radiate’ because as Charles E. May puts it, the writer ‘maintains a distanced objectivity from the story’. This is done by avoiding the obvious revelation of a protagonist’s state of mind and making it clear only through his or her actions and surroundings, a skill Chekhov believed highly in, since “when you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch your reader’s heart, try to be colder- it gives their grief as it were a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep, and you sigh’.
This is also touched upon by Frank O’Connor, when he talks about truth in literature and concludes that ‘sentimentality always means falsity, for whether or not one can perceive the lie, one is always aware of being in the presence of a lie.’ Over sentimentality makes writing reductive; the ending of A Farewell to Arms, for instance is powerful because the irony is so understated that it leaves its mark; the protagonist who has lost his lover in childbirth goes ‘back to the hotel in the rain’. There are no qualms about the height of the tragedy, however Hemingway’s approach is simple and effective; he doesn’t allow himself lengthy paragraphs, going over the grief and misery or shock the protagonist is experiencing.
Taking on board this advice, I have worked at depicting emotion solely through a person’s actions. If there’s an instance of suicidal behaviour, nothing is ever made explicitly clear through direct thoughts, I maintain a distanced objectivity, for example, a woman pushes a plate in a tub full of hot water and despite that it’s scalding her hands, ‘she presses the plate further down, then lifts it up slowly’.
Despite that events occur in the ‘wide-awake daylight of the everyday world’, reality is not expanded on and becomes illusive. Mostly, short stories work by presenting ‘hard facts’ within a figurative form so that their moments and objects become significant metaphors. May also suggests expressing complex inner states ‘by presenting selected concrete details’, thereby ‘creating an illusion of inner reality by focussing on external details only’. In Carver’s “Why don’t you dance?”, although we are not told directly about the reality of the man’s situation, we know that there is something very wrong from the fact that he arranges the furniture on his lawn exactly as it is inside his house. One of my stories opens with the protagonist unable to remove a stain from the tap’s spout, only to discover at end that she had indeed removed it, which is to be taken as a metaphor of her independence and ability to take control of her life.
The novel is credible because its ‘metonymic details’ allow the reader to believe that they understand what they are reading in the same way that ‘they know external reality.’ However, in a short story these ‘metonymic details’ are given meaning according to the particular themes of the story that directs them. This is done by ‘repetition and parallelism’. Thus, in a short story every small detail must matter. Courttia Newland also emphasizes the importance of economy in the short story, that ‘a protagonist should not be characterized too heavily, and the mention of minor characters brief.’ In the short story, there is no time to switch perspectives, important information is withheld and the writer has the power of directing the reader’s thoughts in any direction.
The modern short story does not aim for plot, but as May suggests, it aims for ‘a certain tone of significance’. The two sources of this significance according to May, could be ‘the episode itself which … seems to have a ‘latent value’ that the artist tries to unveil’ or ‘the subjectivity of the teller, his perception that what seems trivial and everyday has, from his point of view, significance and meaning’. Most of my stories are an attempt at revealing a hidden emotion, or a character’s trait. In “The Prickly Pears” which was published in the Bristol Short Story 2017 Prize Anthology, everyday reality is broken by a crisis; a family who is waiting for their son to return home find out that he is not coming. His nonappearance is tragic because the family have been preparing all day and they haven’t seen him in years.
Generally, short stories that focus on single situations that occur over a short period of time are more effective than those is which time is not limited to a day or a significant moment. In fact, Tania Hershman advises against cramming a man’s life into about 3000 words, since in doing so, one fails to reach the emotional impact of specific moments in time, which tell us more about the characters and their importance in the larger frame of the narrative.
Alice Munro finds the concept of ‘time’ to be very interesting, ‘the past and present, and how the past appears as people change’. Reading her stories has allowed me to understand better how to compress the complexity and variation of a novel into ‘several dozen pages’ with intricate events and complicated characters. For instance, in “Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You”, Munro goes over the lives of Char, Et, Blaikie and Arthur. The story goes back and forth in time and yet, despite there being a lot of doubt about the plot and what actually happens in the end, the characters are strong and Munro manages to tell their individual stories without summarizing anything. However, despite their ‘novelistic’ nature, her stories ‘do not communicate as novels do’, because of their sense of mystery. They are hidden stories about ‘the secret life’. In some of my stories, I attempted this sense of ambiguity; leaving out details about where a family goes to live at the end of a story or what a protagonist’s mother dies of.
Despite these differences in style, a similar element in all the stories that fascinate me is the development of what John Dewey refers to as ‘an experience’. This constitutes ‘a single quality that pervades the entire experience’. For most of the stories I would say that this quality is a sense of realism. This realism manifests itself also in the choice of character. Much like Chekhov, I am concerned with the individual. He wrote about ‘ordinary love and family life without villains and angels … smooth, ordinary life as it actually is” and believed that ‘in literature, the lower ranks are as necessary as in the army’. All the characters that pique my interest are ordinary people with ordinary lives; they are unremarkable, people you might see on the street, people you might know, but their problems matter, insignificant as they themselves might be. They matter because everyone else has felt like they have at some point, their pain is understood. Their significance is strengthened by less important characters who enter their lives briefly or who have been there for a long time.
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Hi writing & reading community 😊
Sorry to interrupt your blog but we need to ask for a little bit of help…
Could you have a look over 3 book covers and let us know your favourite?
The story is called ‘Coals to Newcastle’ by Andrew Segal and is a short tale about romance, marriage, deceit and madness - affairs of the heart and mind.
Once you’ve decided on which you think is the most gripping - comment below with your favourite (1,2 or 3) & please do let us know what you think of the graphics more generally. We’d love you to critique them so we can improve 😊
Thank you so much 🙏 We really appreciate your support ❤️
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Frank O’Connor says that ‘the short story has never had a hero’, but it has ‘a submerged population group’. The people in short stories have been defeated by ‘a society that offers no goals and no answers’. These are the misunderstood, the unheard, ‘the outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’ and all the stories that fascinate me display ‘the intense awareness of human loneliness’, outlined by O’ Connor. Ultimately I feel that this is the real purpose of the short story, a study of the common man and his struggles, through ‘a little piece of life’.
About Amber Duivenvoorden
My name is Amber Duivenvoorden. I am a first year PhD student in Creative Writing from Malta. I am doing my PhD at Bath Spa University and am writing a collection of short stories set in Malta. In my research I am investigating how the outcast developed from the 1950s to contemporary times in relation to colonialism and the effect that the latter had, and continues to have on society’s perception of the outcast. My short story ‘The Prickly Pears’ was shortlisted and published in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 2017 and another story, ‘Amazing Grace’, was published in Antae Journal, issued by the University of Malta. My short story ‘The Kingdom’ was also longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018.
References
Awano, Lisa Dickler, An Interview with Alice Munro (2006),
Carver, Raymond, “Why don’t you dance?” in Collected Stories , ed, by William Stull (USA: Library of America; Definitive ed. edition, 2009).
Chekhov, Anton, “The Kiss” in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov , ed, by Richard Pevear (USA: Modern Library, 2000)
E. May, Charles “The Birth of the Modern Story”, in “I am Your Brother”: Short Story Studies (USA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms (London: Arrow Books, 2004)
Hershman, Tania, “The shorter end of short stories – boundaries with poetry”, in Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ and Artists' Companion, ed. by Carole Angier and Sally Cline (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
Munro, Alice, ‘Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You’, in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (London: Penguin Books, 1974
Newland, Courttia, ‘Stories: those little slices of life’, in Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ ad Artists’ Companion, ed. by Carole Angier and Sally Cline (London: Bloomsbury, 2015),
O’Connor, Frank, “An Author in Search of a Subject”, in The Lonely Voice; A Study of the Short Story (New Jersey: Melville House Publishing, 2004)
Shaw, Valerie, “Glanced at through a window’: characterization”, in The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (New York: Longman, 1983)
Springstubb, Tricia, “Short Story Collection Shows Munro in Top Form”, in The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, 1998) in Charles E. May, “The Short Story Way of Meaning” in “I am Your Brother”
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