Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 (Studies in 20th Century Literature)

favour of Impressionism, the registering of 'fleeting impressions'. This in turn gave way to the more stable art of Post-Impressionism, explained in the following terms by Matisse: Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.• Matisse evokes an ideal not unrelated to that which Pound proposed for poetry. According to Pound, the poet should reject the discursive in favour of the 'Image' -'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' . 7 The image was Symbolist to the extent that it acted as an 'equation' for an emotion. A concern for the expressive image also underlies Virginia Woolf's writings on the novel. She rejected conventionally coherent narrative discourse and wanted instead to 'trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness' (my italics).' It would make for over-simplification if we were to tie these analogous developments in the arts too tightly together. Yet, for the purpose of placing the short story in the picture, it is worth looking back to the one unifying figure who can be cited as a source for the preference for 'image' over 'discourse'. This is Edgar Allan Poe, who in a celebrated essay entitled 'The Poetic Principle' stated firmly that 'a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase "a long poem" is simply a flat contradiction in terms:• Poe separated the poetic moment, characterised by excitement and intensity, from what he felt was the anti-climax of narrative. According to him, even in Paradise Lost: 'After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical pre-judgement can force us to admire. ' 10 We may quarrel with Poe's use of the word 'inevitably' but we can still feel the force of his argument for the primacy of the short lyric over the longer narrative poem. In his own terms it remains true that the lyric can preserve intensity and unity of impression-coherence of tone might be a better phrase-in a way not possible in a longer poem. And the distinction he made between lyric and narrative effects fell on ripe ground. His ideas were eagerly taken up by the French Symbolists, who adduced his theories as support for their ideal of non-discursive expressiveness in literature. 'terror of the soul'. Stories such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'Ligeia', 'The Oval Portrait' and 'Eleonora' are essentially static works in which images and stylised dramatic scenes act as 'objective correlatives' for states of mind or feeling. Yet these stories represent only one side of Poe's talent. He was not only a Symbolist and master of mood and atmosphere: he was also a master of the tale with an intricate plot. From Poe's tales we can trace the growth of the modern detective or mystery story. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' is an excellent example of this type of tale. It is replete with violent, indeed with Gothically horrid action. None the less the tale is reduced to manageable proportions by an amateur detective within the story and by a framing narrator 'outside' it. Much is made of the parallel between the detective solving the mystery and the artist/narrator imposing order on the chaos of impressions. Yet the parallel is not exact: the order created by the detective is illusory, while that of the artist exists on a different plane and remains valid. Poe has often been called the master of ratiocinative processes, of narrative which progresses through deduction and induction. Yet when we look closely at his stories we do not find true logical consistency but only a carefully contrived 'air of consequence and causality', in Poe's own words. The Keynotes, Discords, Monochromes, In the Key of Blue. An important point emerges: that these writers were interested in prose in prefer-How was it? She could laugh quite naturally, read and be interested in her book. 1 • Despite the author's lack of skill, the effect is technically very different from that created by novelists such as Hardy and Meredith who were exploring similar areas of women's subjective experience in this Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-9 The 1880s and 1890s: Impressionists and Imperialists....Pages 10-33 The Tale-Tellers: I....Pages 34-54 Moments of Being: Modernist Short Fiction....Pages 55-81 The Tale-Tellers: II....Pages 82-111 The Free Story....Pages 112-139 Postmodernist and Other Fictions....Pages 140-172 Back Matter....Pages 173-189