Why the Short Story?

When I was in high school I remember feeling some strange disappointment when I would come across a book of short stories by an author whose novel’s I admired or when I was assigned a story for school.

I loved to read and always had, and did so a fair amount, but I found that I much preferred the long form of the novel to that of the more brief, inherently and uniquely reserved, short story. I certainly enjoyed, for the most part, what I read of author’s like Flannery O’Connor (who I today consider one of America’s greatest writers ever), mostly, I’m sure, for her weirdly ambiguous endings and mysterious characters.

Yet, I seem to have found the lack of unique plot twists and of distinctly moving moral situations so common in the short form to be a negative. I’ve been wondering why. Today, I prefer few novels to a wonderful short story (and no, it’s not because a short story does not surpass the 300 page limit I often say I don’t read beyond, jokingly of course).

Don’t get me wrong. Good short stories, and certainly O’Conner’s, do contain moving moral situations. But they are necessarily reserved in their immediate implications towards the reader. Since, in the short form, the author is limited regarding how much information they can provide, how much background they can introduce, how close they can make the reader feel to the situation or characters, such moral dilemmas can only mean so much to the reader. In other words, since you can’t know Mr. Smith from Joe White’s The Made-up Story as well as you could have had the story been a novel, then the fact that he is about to burn down his home and join a militia group is going to be less meaningful than it would be if you did know him as intimately as a similarly plotted novel would allow.

(Note that I said that short stories are limited in their “immediate implications.” Further contemplation and interpretation certainly will open up a world of implications to the thoughtful, observant reader.)

So, it would seem, the short form is concerned above all with the “why?” of the tale and the novel above all with fact, incident – the “what” of the story.

Of course, part of my lack of affection for the short form back then probably derives from the fact that novels – and the good one’s especially – are uniquely capable of creating plot-based excitement and anticipation, emotionally transfixing moral conundrums, and characters whose many layers offer insights into the human existence. Things that the short story simply cannot provide in the same way. The short story writer must work within the confines of their form and therefore they must say what they want to say, or rather show what they want to show, in a much less complicated – though, hopefully, no less thoughtful – fashion.

Necessarily, therefore, the short story, since it cannot do all the work itself, demands much more of the reader than the common novel (there are exceptions, of course). This is probably why, as a high school student, I didn’t much appreciate the form. I didn’t want to have to work as much as was being demanded of me.

I love this quote by Harold Bloom (from How To Read and Why) that, I think, sums the idea up pretty well, and provides some advice to boot:

Short stories favor the tacit; they compel the reader to be active, and to discern explanations that the writer avoids.The reader… must slow down, quite deliberately, and start listening with the inner ear. Such listening overhears the characters, as well as hearing them; think of them as your characters, and wonder what is implied, rather than told about them. Unlike most figures in novels, their foregrounding are largely up to you, utilizing the hints subtly provided by the reader.

From Turgenev through Eudora Welty and beyond, short story writers refrain from moral judgments… The most skilled short story writers are as elliptical in regard to moral judgments as they are in regard to continuities of action of the details of a character’s past life. You, as reader, are to decide if moral judgment if relevant, and then the judgment will be yours to make.

The short story provides some unique challenges for both writer and reader, challenges that they must, in effect, confront together, in concert with each other.

In it’s own meta-fictive way, reading a short story is a bit like solving a mystery. The clues are laid out for us (one hopes) and it is our job to make sense of them.

It is for this reason that I love reading a good short story.

And I suppose, therefore, that writing a short story is something like creating a puzzle, perhaps one of the crossword variety even. It is the job the writer to set forth pieces whose shapes will appropriately fit together. With just the right amount of ambiguity of course.

I for one hope the short story makes a comeback.

Prejudice the Soil

The essentialist rejects the progressive theory of growth with nothing-fixed-in-advance, a planless education based upon the unselected experiences and needs of the child or even selected by cooperative, shared discussions of pupils and teachers.  Growth cannot be self-directed; it needs direction through a carefully chosen environment to an end or ends in the minds of those who have been entrusted by society with the child’s education.  The problem is not new; it was first posed in modern times by Rousseau and has been the subject of controversy ever since.  It was answered for all time by Coleridge nearly 100 years ago in the following story.  –Isaac Leon Kandel, Prejudice the Garden Toward Roses?, 1939

Kandel then quotes from Coleridge’s Table Talk, July 26, 1830.

Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself.  I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. “How so?” said he, “it is covered with weeds.”—“Oh,” I replied, “that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice.  The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.”

E. D. Hirsch argued that Romanticism took root in American education and has continued to infect it with the kind of naturalism prescribed by Rousseau (The Schools We Need, 1996).  What I continue to appreciate about Coleridge is that he breaks the Romantic mold as it displaces the divine with the human.  The result is, as seen in the above quote, that Coleridge perceived the true nature of education as that which seeks to “exhibit the ends of our moral being.”

Is it Time to Listen to Jeremiah?

When Israel was consistently unfaithful to her God, He sent prophet after prophet warning of judgment. Finally, He sent Jeremiah.

Jeremiah has always been one of my favorite Biblical personalities because he is of that more Romantic temperament that weeps over bad news but stays the course. But he was seen by his people as unpatriotic.

I can’t help but think of Jeremiah when I think of my country, which I love. Prior to 9/11 it was common to hear Jeremiads in the evangelical press about God’s coming judgment on America for her many sins.

Her abortion sacrifices were compared to the children offered to Moloch. Her homosexuality was compared to Sodom and Gomorrah. And so on.

Some things that were talked about less: her godless striving for a centralized State (cf. God’s warnings to Israel when they wanted a king and his response to David for numbering the people) and her murderous foreign policy.

Our fear of the Soviet Union after WWII convinced us that we had to have the most powerful military the world had ever seen with the most elaborate spy network ever imagined. Maybe we did.

But we compromised our integrity in so many ways and in so many places that we are no longer the same kind of nation. We meddle in affairs wherever we come up with any national security excuse to do so.

We are fundamentally a frightened nation who cannot trust in God to keep us safe and secure and we are making an awful mess of it ourselves. On the right, this fear seems to have become the test for whether one is patriotic.

On the left, it’s a resisted necessity – protested on the streets but lived on in the family room.

Many things have eaten the heart out of our country. The one thing that is big enough to bring us down is our foreign activity.

What will happen next? Nobody, especially not the CIA, knows. Except this: having sown the wind, we are reaping the whirlwind.

I said before that prior to 9/11 we heard plenty of Jeremiads. Once, after 9/11, I was in a meeting where America’s foreign policies came up for discussion. I pointed out that it may be that God is sending judgment.

The room was all Christians. The response was icy. I was surprised. It seems obvious to me that we are a nation confused. It seems obvious to me that we have lost our way.

But now that the consequences about which my parents warned me since I was a child might be actualizing, it’s unpatriotic to suggest that God might be letting His statutes and counsels and law play out.

Yes, it’s depressing. It’s an awful thing watching a loved one die. But I don’t see us making it if the household of God doesn’t stop preaching about the sins of the world and start repenting of her own sins.

I worship a God of mercy and grace, but I must say, we’ve had so many chances already. Why would we repent?

Anyway, all this was triggered when I started reflecting on this article, and I think in political terms he’s probably right. Putting an end to the American Empire is the only way the American Republic can thrive in the coming century.

Take a look. Like Daniel, let us repent for the sins of our people, but first, let us repent for our own sins.