Opinion: Short Stories
Recently, since reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the short story. I’ve always written short stories, but I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, to tell long, grand tales over hundreds of pages. Consequently, I’ve always read novels rather than short stories. And novels are worthwhile, fulfilling experiences. But they take a long time, and it just hit me that maybe, and I think this is true of myself, though I can’t speak for anyone else, I generally don’t enjoy novels while I’m reading them, only afterwards, when I look back on them. This thought put me in mind of two aphorisms I read a while ago, the source of which I can’t be bothered to track down right now. The first is:
“Classics are the books nobody wants to read, but everybody wants to have read.”
the second, rather more blunt one, is:
“Big book: big bore.”
I love novels: I’m reading three at the moment (although perhaps the fact that I start new novels halfway through ones I’m already reading suggests that I find something lacking in the ones I have begun reading, or that I feel impatient for the end of the novel, for the experience of reading to have ceased and the experience of having read to have begun), but there’s definitely something very attractive about the short story.
For Raymond Carver, and I suspect too for Ernest Hemingway, and presumably many other of the short story writers who made their living not soley through their fiction, the attraction was that the short story “could be written and read in one sitting.” This was important to Carver through necessity, because he only had so much time for writing, but doesn’t that resonate strongly with our current proliferation and importance on instant entertainment? When there’s so many quickfire bursts of audio-visual experience at our fingertips, who is inclined to commit the twenty or so hours it takes to read a novel to sitting there, taking in printed words?
I know a lot of people, even on my writing course, who say they should read more, and, even in the university environment I’m in, I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t read it at all. Certainly I myself begrudge the time it takes to read a novel, not because there are necessarily better things I could be doing with my time, just because it takes so long. I have about twenty books lined up on my shelf that I’m looking forward to reading, and a lot of these are big six-hundred-pages-plus books, like Middlemarch, Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote. I just don’t know where I’m going to find the time for all those. Added to which, I feel that I’m quite a slow reader. I don’t know why, but if I read fast I feel like I miss to much. Sometimes I feel like I can write at the same speed I read, if I have my ideas planned out beforehand.
The other problem I have with novels, which the short story seems to escape, is the problem of comfort. It’s so difficult to get comfortable when reading for the extended periods a novel requires because it’s so awkward and unnatural to hold a page and tilt your head at an angle you can see the words. I can sit like that for maybe ten minutes before my neck starts to ache or my leg goes to sleep or whatever. Italo Calvino discusses this problem in the opening pages of his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
With the short story I also find there’s a certain exhiliration to the narrative that is different in quality to that felt when reading a novel, like the difference between looking at a Polaroid picture and at a grand painting, just because the narrative has to be so fast and tight to get all of the story across. It’s nice to be able to sit down and absorb a complete narrative experience “in a single sitting”, rather than piecing together meaning across a series of readings to come to a complete understanding of the characters or the plot.
Of course, both Hemingway and Carver are exceptional writers, and their minimalist style is well suited to the short story; I couldn’t imagine Carver writing a novel, and I have not yet read any of Hemingway’s novels. What I find particularly interesting about Carver is the contrast between him and Virginia Woolf (whose Mrs. Dalloway I am also reading). Their styles couldn’t be more different: one uses the fewest words possible to convey meaning, while the other uses thes most adjectives and subordinate clauses to convey a totalness of experience, but they pretty much write about the same things, just at different points. What I mean is, Carver in his stories often examines the single, often minute, event that changes the life of his protagonists. For example in Neighbors there is the husband and wife finding out that they both separately liked to go over to the neighbours’ house and imagine what it was like to be the neighbours, and this will have obvious, though ambiguous, repercussions for their relationship. Virginia Woolf too focuses on relationships, but she examines them at great length after such an event, looking at all the repercussions and how they have affected the characters.
I realise this entry is getting a little ecclectic because I didn’t really plan it out: I was just hit with this sudden appreciation of short stories. What I think my ultimate point is, is that, though I have always assumed novels to be, if you will, the ultimate written form; complete wholistic entities, that every writer should aspire to, I’m beginning to realise, after five years of writing them, that the short story can be a poignant and fulfilling narrative medium as well.
Tags: Don Quixote, Ernest Hemingway, Finnegans Wake, Italo Calvino, James Joyce, Middlemarch, Raymond Carver, Relationships, short stories, Virginia Woolf
