A rare brand of intimacy: reconsidering the structure and unique effect of the short story

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the short story is a unique fictional form, with its own specific conventions, knowledge of which could usefully inform the teaching of short story writing. There has been very little attempt to explain how a short story means (as opposed to what it means) and it is only by articulating and analyzing specific short story conventions that we can move towards such an explanation. The main ‘convention’, I argue, concerns the reader’s response to the short story: a response that occurs in a context of brief intensity and heightened involvement (due to the aesthetics of brevity), with the story acquired and retained whole’ in the reader’s memory. This in turn encourages readers to appropriate the fictive world as rendered through one or more represented subjectivities inscribed in the narrative. I have termed this appropriation the ‘narratorial presence’ of the short story, and I argue that it is the enabling effect of the tale’s telling. It occurs in different ways in different stories, predominantly in response to the mix of specific devices used to render different narrative perspectives. Performing analyses of Joyce’s ‘The dead’ and Hemingway’s ‘The killers’, and also briefly examining what I see as a Hemingway-esque Australian short story, ‘Tap’ by Garry Disher, I demonstrate how each story’s structure ‘manages’ all other aspects of the narrative,facilitating the effect of ‘narratorial presence’. A recognition of this effect could, I suggest, renew discussion of, or perhaps even initiate the construction of a new framework for the teaching of short story writing.