The Form Read Round the World: American Short Fiction and World Story

Abstract

International Short Fiction 28 AnaMen?ndez |Cuba/UnitedStates 30 Raija Siekkinen |Finland 34 Nicole Lee | Malaysia 37 AndreiCornea |Romania 38 FatouD?ome |Senegal/France 40 CyrilleFleisch man |France 42 Simon Fruelund | Denmark 45 Benjamin Percy | UnitedStates 47 Amanda Michalopoulou | Greece 50 AlixOhlin I Canada/UnitedStates 241World Literature Today The Form Read Round the World: American Short Fiction and World Story AlanCheuse We'll never know when the first preclas sical rhetors or Homers sounded their earliest invocation to the Muse on the air of antique Greece. That event is lost to us in time,and only some gifted fiction writer can give us a hint ofwhat thatmoment out of theprehis toricpast may have been like. Living here in history full-blown as we do now, we can confirm some facts about the origins of a much more recent literary form?the modern short story. We know thaton such and such a date in theearly nineteenth century, theeditor ofBlack wood's magazine in Edinburgh published a story by Edgar Allan Poe, thusbringing to thepotential reading public of England, Europe, and America the first of a long lineof commercial fiction.Slight lyolder thanPoe, New YorkerWashington Irving had in 1819published his "Rip Van Winkle" in the firstvolume of The SketchBook ofGeoffrey Crayon, Gent, a hardcover collection of tales, and a year later, in a subsequent volume of this same series, he brought out "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Hawthorne published his early tales inbook form aswell. JamesFenimore Cooper published his first novel that same year. But of all these American writers itwas Poe, bentwith his raving genius, his drinking problem, and his money problems, who determined to eke out a living frompublishing short fiction in small commercial magazines, some of which he eventu ally edited. He worked at this labor some decades before Europeans such as Gustave Flaubert and Liter Guy de Maupassant had settled on the short-story formas a vehicle for making art that coincided with popular entertainment. More than half a centuryafterPoe's death, theyoung Russian physician Anton Chekhov began publishing his first humorous sketches inMoscow literary maga zines and, subsequently, a long string of short prose fictionabout everyday lifethat most Ameri can writers identifyas themodel of themodern "art story." Ironically, our man Poe arrived at the form decades before. Here itmight be wise to stop fora moment andmeditate on thebrevity of thehistory of themodern story. It's a blink of theeye compared to the long gaze of theepic. Ever since theadvent of theHomeric epics with their anecdotes and tale-like narratives within the larger poem, what we call "tales"?accounts or brief narratives of an event, sometimes delivered with imaginative flair?as opposed to stories,have been inplentiful supply, from the Bible to Chaucer to Boccaccio. In those brief narratives embedded in narra tive poems, the source remains self-evident?all belong to the overall narration. In Boccaccio, we read tales recounted to us by the narrator. Folk tales come tous out of thatgreatmist we thinkof, because it is easy to do so, as the popular culture of the time. What distinguishes all this traditional short fictional narrative from the modern short story? The nature of the art work itself. The anecdote, the fable, the folk tale?all would entertain us and, ultimately, call our attention to some moral problem or founding event inwhat we take tobe theworld of gods and history. The modern story writer, from Poe onward, seeks to create a work of short fictionthat,likea lyric poem, has no immedi ate tie to the culture inwhich thewriter works or to thehistoryofhis orher time.All reference to the everyday world comes by way of analogy only. The artstory, as Iwould like to call itfromhere on out, is a discrete creation that possesses its own aesthetic,bywhich itstands or falls. We connect it to actual life in the same way we do a poem or a painting?as Imentioned, by analogy. September-October 2010 125 Looking at this from another angle, we can see that simply identifying the modern short fiction maker as a writer propels the genre into a new realm. All themyths and brief anecdotal narratives from Homer onward through the late Greek and earlyRoman period...