We are the Dead
For both of you who are paying attention, the first paragraph completely rewritten.
We Are The Dead
The Sordid State of the Short Story in America
Perhaps we should blame Joyce. Yes, the continental naturalists, typically French writers like Flaubert, Zola and Huysmann, were the pioneers of the slice-of-life story, the first to emphasize so completely psychology and realism over plot and ideas. But it was Joyce who single-handedly delivered slice-of-life to the anglophone world in short stories like Moses descending from the mount. Specifically in the United States, the effect of his collection Dubliners cannot be understated, especially its moment of greatest triumph, "The Dead." What was at its time of composition an experimental oddity has here taken root and become an inescapable, institutionalized form, despite the fact that even Joyce himself moved on from it into the outer reaches of narrative. The short stories that pour out of today's MFA's programs and clog up literary journals, collections and anthologies are dominated by the kind of poignant slice-of-life story epitomized by "The Dead" and have helped bring about the transformation of the short story from a genuinely popular form into a cultural hinterland mostly read by writers, editors and people involved in the publishing industry in a self-perpetuating cycle.
It's difficult for us looking back to understand what a revolution Dubliners must have represented to the anglophones and especially to Americans, whose short fiction was dominated at the time by plot-centric writing in the mode of Kipling and O. Henry. The stories in Dubliners don't today read like the kind of experimental writing they essentially were, to the point that Joyce himself didn't even want to call them stories; he preferred the term he co-opted from Catholicism and which he forever redefined in our vocabulary: "Epiphanies". Before Joyce, one knew what a story was: it was something with a beginning, a middle and an end that built towards a definite climax. Whereas O. Henry was criticized for writing nothing but the ending, with Joyce all was middle. Dubliners taught us that a story can be just a deft character sketch; a situation that never resolves but serves to establish a mood; a painting in words that illustrates a time and a place and a people. The book culminates with "The Dead", perhaps, the great masterwork of Modernist short fiction.
The qualities that make "The Dead" so well-regarded have been written about at great length elsewhere by writers more capable than myself. What's important to note is that the story is a realistic, slice-of-life tale, carefully crafted and beautifully written, that shows characters with great psychological depth and sensitivity, and which ends with a moment of clarity and insight--perhaps insight for the character, but more certainly insight for the reader. Also, in terms of the action, very little, if anything happens.
This description of a story so unusual for its time could now be applied to the vast majority of American literary short fiction published today. The mantel of the slice-of-life story was taken up by Hemingway and Faulkner and then later Updike and Joyce Carol Oats until finally being completely codified by Raymond Carver. What can be called the "Raymond Carver short story" is basically "The Dead" crossed with Hemingway's minimalist sensibilities, rewritten over and over again as one after another character lurches through his or her everyday life towards that final, inevitable epiphanic moment.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this kind of story, and many excellent examples of it can be found both in the oeuvre of Carver and in American (and, indeed, British and Irish) short stories in general. What's remarkable is its complete dominance over the form in our country. Any casual survey of short story collections and literary magazines will find one overwhelmed with the Carver/Joycean model of storytelling, stories full of middles with no end in sight. This is partially due to the way the model has been throughly commodified over the years by that most reputable of magazines, The New Yorker which, it seems, every short fiction writer in America yearns to be published in.
Recently, there has been a movement, spearheaded admirably by Michael Chabon, to restore plot elements to literary short fiction, looking fondly back to the days of Henry James' ghost stories and Edgar Allen Poe's detective fiction and tales of the macabre. But even Chabon's 2005 editorship of the highly-regarded and influential Best American Short Stories series found no less than four stories straight out of the New Yorker, and a majority of stories in general in the slice-of-life mode (in addition to remarkable stories not in the mode by the likes of Kelly Link, Cory Doctorow, Dennis Lehane, Tim Pratt and others). One suspects this is not because of anything sinister on the part of the series editor of the publication, who provided Chabon with the pool from which most of his selections were chosen, or even an effort by Chabon to not appear unduly biased towards plotted fiction but merely because of the vast preponderance of well-written, highly crafted slice-of-life stories from which he or anyone sifting through American short fiction has to choose from.
This state of affairs is not the case in other countries and languages. In Spanish, for instance, the distinctly un-Joycean work of Borges and his fellow magical realists have led to short works by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar that stem from entirely different galaxies of narrative. French, the very language that gave birth to Naturalism, has given us the stylistic innovations of the Nouveau Román of Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot and the hauntingly stark work of Herve Guibert. I'm also given to understand that there are fascinating things happening in Russian, Japanese and Chinese, but contemporary short fiction is so infrequently translated from those languages to ours or distributed and publicized in this country that it's difficult to know for sure. Part of the problem has to do with the way Americans consume and are marketed fiction in general; in a recent magazine called To My American Readers designed to promote French writers to Americans, Jean-David Levitte, the French Ambassador to the United States wrote:
When a reader enters a French bookstore, the choice is truly cosmopolitan--on a bookshelf of 100 novels, more than 25 are translations, and fully two-thirds are Anglo-American. French bookstores, following the example of other European bookstores, make available books by as many international authors as possible--a great number of which are the works of living American authors translated into French.
When a reader enters an American bookstore, the experience is quite different--he similarly finds himself before a bookshelf of 100 publications, but only 3 are translations, and only 1 is the work of a French author. In contrast to French bookstores, American bookstores almost exclusively sell American works, with almost no shelf space devoted to the works of foreign authors.
That is to say, in a word, Americans are insulated.
To be fair, there have been Americans who have attempted to innovate in short fiction since the days of Joyce. One thinks of, for instance, of the post-modern writing of Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover, or the hallucinogenic collections of vignettes that made up the "novels" of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. More recently we have David Foster Wallace with his attempts to undermine traditional narrative assumptions, and the aforementioned Michael Chabon and his conscientious exploration of genre. However, these people have been in the minority, and work like theirs is not what we see when we open up the average literary magazine or short story collection. Indeed, the form that was codified by Raymond Carver and commodified by the New Yorker has now further been institutionalized by the MFA programs of this country, to the point where it seems all of the young American writers are only reading each other and have no sense of the rich history and diversity of a form that stretches back to Poe, James and even farther to Cervantes and Chaucer. The American short story "scene" is a vast incestuous mess of people all writing like one-another, bestowing awards upon one another and generally operating in a tiny, little bubble, where they are largely and justly ignored by the general population.
It doesn't have to be this way. In past times and in other countries, short fiction was/is the popular art form it was always intended to be. In an age where attention spans seem to be getting shorter and where brief, self-contained narrative has been ingrained in our culture thanks to television, short fiction could be poised to make its come back. What we need is more people like Chabon championing the cause of accessible, captivating work and a deemphasis on the slice-of-life short story that has risen to prominence and stagnated over the course of the last century. It is time, at long last, to bury "The Dead".
We Are The Dead
The Sordid State of the Short Story in America
Perhaps we should blame Joyce. Yes, the continental naturalists, typically French writers like Flaubert, Zola and Huysmann, were the pioneers of the slice-of-life story, the first to emphasize so completely psychology and realism over plot and ideas. But it was Joyce who single-handedly delivered slice-of-life to the anglophone world in short stories like Moses descending from the mount. Specifically in the United States, the effect of his collection Dubliners cannot be understated, especially its moment of greatest triumph, "The Dead." What was at its time of composition an experimental oddity has here taken root and become an inescapable, institutionalized form, despite the fact that even Joyce himself moved on from it into the outer reaches of narrative. The short stories that pour out of today's MFA's programs and clog up literary journals, collections and anthologies are dominated by the kind of poignant slice-of-life story epitomized by "The Dead" and have helped bring about the transformation of the short story from a genuinely popular form into a cultural hinterland mostly read by writers, editors and people involved in the publishing industry in a self-perpetuating cycle.
It's difficult for us looking back to understand what a revolution Dubliners must have represented to the anglophones and especially to Americans, whose short fiction was dominated at the time by plot-centric writing in the mode of Kipling and O. Henry. The stories in Dubliners don't today read like the kind of experimental writing they essentially were, to the point that Joyce himself didn't even want to call them stories; he preferred the term he co-opted from Catholicism and which he forever redefined in our vocabulary: "Epiphanies". Before Joyce, one knew what a story was: it was something with a beginning, a middle and an end that built towards a definite climax. Whereas O. Henry was criticized for writing nothing but the ending, with Joyce all was middle. Dubliners taught us that a story can be just a deft character sketch; a situation that never resolves but serves to establish a mood; a painting in words that illustrates a time and a place and a people. The book culminates with "The Dead", perhaps, the great masterwork of Modernist short fiction.
The qualities that make "The Dead" so well-regarded have been written about at great length elsewhere by writers more capable than myself. What's important to note is that the story is a realistic, slice-of-life tale, carefully crafted and beautifully written, that shows characters with great psychological depth and sensitivity, and which ends with a moment of clarity and insight--perhaps insight for the character, but more certainly insight for the reader. Also, in terms of the action, very little, if anything happens.
This description of a story so unusual for its time could now be applied to the vast majority of American literary short fiction published today. The mantel of the slice-of-life story was taken up by Hemingway and Faulkner and then later Updike and Joyce Carol Oats until finally being completely codified by Raymond Carver. What can be called the "Raymond Carver short story" is basically "The Dead" crossed with Hemingway's minimalist sensibilities, rewritten over and over again as one after another character lurches through his or her everyday life towards that final, inevitable epiphanic moment.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this kind of story, and many excellent examples of it can be found both in the oeuvre of Carver and in American (and, indeed, British and Irish) short stories in general. What's remarkable is its complete dominance over the form in our country. Any casual survey of short story collections and literary magazines will find one overwhelmed with the Carver/Joycean model of storytelling, stories full of middles with no end in sight. This is partially due to the way the model has been throughly commodified over the years by that most reputable of magazines, The New Yorker which, it seems, every short fiction writer in America yearns to be published in.
Recently, there has been a movement, spearheaded admirably by Michael Chabon, to restore plot elements to literary short fiction, looking fondly back to the days of Henry James' ghost stories and Edgar Allen Poe's detective fiction and tales of the macabre. But even Chabon's 2005 editorship of the highly-regarded and influential Best American Short Stories series found no less than four stories straight out of the New Yorker, and a majority of stories in general in the slice-of-life mode (in addition to remarkable stories not in the mode by the likes of Kelly Link, Cory Doctorow, Dennis Lehane, Tim Pratt and others). One suspects this is not because of anything sinister on the part of the series editor of the publication, who provided Chabon with the pool from which most of his selections were chosen, or even an effort by Chabon to not appear unduly biased towards plotted fiction but merely because of the vast preponderance of well-written, highly crafted slice-of-life stories from which he or anyone sifting through American short fiction has to choose from.
This state of affairs is not the case in other countries and languages. In Spanish, for instance, the distinctly un-Joycean work of Borges and his fellow magical realists have led to short works by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar that stem from entirely different galaxies of narrative. French, the very language that gave birth to Naturalism, has given us the stylistic innovations of the Nouveau Román of Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot and the hauntingly stark work of Herve Guibert. I'm also given to understand that there are fascinating things happening in Russian, Japanese and Chinese, but contemporary short fiction is so infrequently translated from those languages to ours or distributed and publicized in this country that it's difficult to know for sure. Part of the problem has to do with the way Americans consume and are marketed fiction in general; in a recent magazine called To My American Readers designed to promote French writers to Americans, Jean-David Levitte, the French Ambassador to the United States wrote:
When a reader enters a French bookstore, the choice is truly cosmopolitan--on a bookshelf of 100 novels, more than 25 are translations, and fully two-thirds are Anglo-American. French bookstores, following the example of other European bookstores, make available books by as many international authors as possible--a great number of which are the works of living American authors translated into French.
When a reader enters an American bookstore, the experience is quite different--he similarly finds himself before a bookshelf of 100 publications, but only 3 are translations, and only 1 is the work of a French author. In contrast to French bookstores, American bookstores almost exclusively sell American works, with almost no shelf space devoted to the works of foreign authors.
That is to say, in a word, Americans are insulated.
To be fair, there have been Americans who have attempted to innovate in short fiction since the days of Joyce. One thinks of, for instance, of the post-modern writing of Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover, or the hallucinogenic collections of vignettes that made up the "novels" of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. More recently we have David Foster Wallace with his attempts to undermine traditional narrative assumptions, and the aforementioned Michael Chabon and his conscientious exploration of genre. However, these people have been in the minority, and work like theirs is not what we see when we open up the average literary magazine or short story collection. Indeed, the form that was codified by Raymond Carver and commodified by the New Yorker has now further been institutionalized by the MFA programs of this country, to the point where it seems all of the young American writers are only reading each other and have no sense of the rich history and diversity of a form that stretches back to Poe, James and even farther to Cervantes and Chaucer. The American short story "scene" is a vast incestuous mess of people all writing like one-another, bestowing awards upon one another and generally operating in a tiny, little bubble, where they are largely and justly ignored by the general population.
It doesn't have to be this way. In past times and in other countries, short fiction was/is the popular art form it was always intended to be. In an age where attention spans seem to be getting shorter and where brief, self-contained narrative has been ingrained in our culture thanks to television, short fiction could be poised to make its come back. What we need is more people like Chabon championing the cause of accessible, captivating work and a deemphasis on the slice-of-life short story that has risen to prominence and stagnated over the course of the last century. It is time, at long last, to bury "The Dead".