POETICS OF THE NARROW SPACE
(cont.)
(b) The dethroning of the
renaissance model
But, understood in a context and in a process, the novella in
its ongoing evolution transforms itself in a way that some of its initial
dominants do not coincide with the newly installed micro genreic and
micro-stylistic literary conventions. The dominant renaissance model of the
novella is dethroned from inside, with its internal self-differentiation on a
level of the syntax, pragmatics, topics, mimetics, stylistics and poetics of the
narrative morphology. The novella is faced with new options. It manifests openly
non-loyalty to its own canon.
At the very beginning of the XIX century, something essential
changed in the structure of the novella. There aren't any more framed
novels-episodes from longer series of short stories, but simply - a short story
(Kurzgeschichte). Some critics estimates the short story as inferior to the
renaissance novel, that is a motive for attributing the short story as a
"illegitimate child of the novel" (Johanes Klein). The short story of
the XIX century is being established as an important and commercialized literary
kind, suitable for the new public mediums (the daily and weekly paper, the
radio-diffusion network). Beside that, in the short story the interest for the
fantastic, miraculous and unreal is deepened which exists synchronically with
the already legitimate realistic-anecdotal kind, a novella of the joke inherited
from the previous three centuries. The mimesis in the short story faces up the
serious crisis. The short stories have appeared which got over with the model of
the semantic and chronological inversion, the model of the "electrical
shock" subject to mannerisation (O'Henry, Mark Twain). There are no
oxymoronly and antithetically built stories-grotesques, but elegant descriptions
and meditations. Such are the stories of atmosphere and condition, of arabesque
and Stimmung (A.P. Chekhov).
The nineteen and twenty-century try to overcome the dogmatized
hierarchy of small and big literary kinds, those worthy of being in a book and
those that are not.
But the short story, nevertheless, is slowly getting out of the
unbearable shadow of the roman, which has a status of a dominant literary kind.
Even in a crisis, the roman (as if) has a bigger literary value. To this
understanding we are lead by the fact that even when the golden era of the roman
coincides with the big epoch of the short story, the roman is the genre that
attracts the official attention of the competent reader, the critic.
The labyrinth of the definitions
an intriguing unreducibleness of the definitions
(a) Meta-theoretic summary
Until the beginning of the twentieth century the short story is on
the edge of the leading theoretic conceptions and interpretations, excluding
several essays by writers and critics: Poe, Goethe, Schlegel, Spilhagen, Brander
Matthews -1884, Henry James. After then follow the poetical statements by James
Joyce (the short story as an "epiphany"), e.g. the essays by V.
Shklovsky and B. Eichenbaum, which are rare projects of the Russian formalists,
dedicated to the theory of the novella/short story, and derived from the
analysis of the novellas by O'Henry and Gogol. The essay by E.A.Poe formulates
the postulate for the totality or for the "unity of the impression"
that the story leaves on the reader, by the culmination as a center of the
controlled fable. Goethe defines the short story as a story for "an unusual
event" which appears uncommon, but not fantastic. According to Schlegel the
short story is an anecdote, unknown yet story which is interesting only by
itself… which gives a reason for irony at its very production".
Victor Shklovski defines the structure of the short story from the
aspect of its contradiction, its ability to produce (a) short stories that
convey unusual story/action and (b) short stories that in the usual actions they
convey discover a new, unusual meaning. He, critically scrutinizing the
conceptions of Goethe, Schlegel and Spilhagen, observes the short story/novella
in continuity, from Apuleos, through Bocaccio to Chehov, upon the principal of
creating a short story from short story, literature from literature, as if he
were a predecessor-follower of the contemporary theory on intertextuality.
Boris Eichenbaum contrasts the two complimentary genres, the roman
as a syncretic form and the novella as an elementary form, by which he presents
these two literary kinds as hostile. He puts an emphasis on the "principal
for unity of the construction with centralized basic effect and strong final
accent" which has marked the American novel since the end of the 19
century, has profaned it and drew it near the anecdote, parody and humoresque,
in contrast to the serious and "high" novel by Irving, Poe, Hawthorn,
James.
Until the seventies of the XX century the theoretical interest for
the short story has been insignificant and secondary. But such a situation has
sharply changed in the last two decades, when the short story has become one of
the focal areas to the postmodernist and post-structuralist theoretic
observations and critical evaluations and interpretations. According to some
investigations, for example between 1976 and 1994, almost twenty years since the
publishing of the first anthological reader by Charles May, with introductory
essay titled "The short story: an underestimated art" and the
second one (The new short story Theories), the short story has
experienced a complete Renaissance. Short stories are written, published,
interpreted more and more, they are highly estimated, the hermeneutic and
epistemological interest for the short story has been increased. A prejudice
drawn through centuries has been finally transcended, an injustice has been
rejected: the short story can return from exile home.
(b) Pluralisation of the
conventions
At the very moment when the novella brings into question the
inherited literary canon it manifests vitality of its genre. Exactly when it is
dropped on the periphery of the literary universe, the novella rehabilitates and
actualizes itself again. The contemporary novelistic practice shows that the
novella is able to survive through constant immanent self-searching and
redefining of the status of the genre. The novella rejects the inherited
conventions and creates the new one.
The nineteen century introduces several synonyms for signifying the
complex of the novelistic genre, where all the prose kinds, different and
shorter than a roman are included. The roman serves again as a starting point in
the defining of the novella and its family of cognate sub-kinds. The
twenty-century places new terms and distinctions (small or short roman, for an
example), so the literary theory faces up gradual, cumulative experience in the
terminological and conceptual distinguishing of the novelistic discourse.
In the twenty-century it is been talked about many novelistic
sub-kinds, about disintegrating of the novelistic code, about disperse structure
of the novella. In respect to the postmodernist epoch that does not protect
strict hierarchic relations in the literary system, the novel-short story is
written in a broad gamme of genre hybridizations, of terminological and
conceptual variations. In Anglo-American tradition at the end of this century
the terms short short story and short story, short fiction are in use. In the
Romanic tradition, Franc, Italian, Spanish, even today exists the term,
inherited from the renaissance period - nouvelle. In the recent Croatian and
Serbian tradition the cognate terms novela, priča, pripovjetka are
in use. Some analogue terms present in the traditions of the Japanese, Chinese
and Indian literature should also be taken into account. Those are the terms
that have synonymous configuration. But, the novella has a homonymic semantics:
the term novella can be read in different ways, depending on the context where
it renders its concrete content precise - as a short story and story, as a saga
or long story, as a novella or short roman…
The short story in the XX century shows its de-canonizing and
inclusive poetics in full light, especially in the actual, postmodernist or
post-postmodernist phase from the end of the century and the end of the
millennium. The poetics of the short story implicates diametrically opposite
narrative morphologies and textuality: - from very short instant story to long
and very long story; - from sketch to small roman; - from short story of
paradoxes to short story of the ambient; - from short story of action and
intrigue to short story of epiphany and condition, in which nothing happens; -
from realistic to fantastic, enigmatic and miraculous; - from elitist and
hermetic to children story; - from closed to open; from meditation to satire,
from philosophical to lascivious-erotic; from detective-criminal to science
-fiction and negatively-utopian; from fictional to pseudo-fictional; from lyric
short story to essay; and from psychoanalytic to autobiographic report.
After the long tradition of undeclared exile, the short story has
been displaced in a constellation in which it has experienced exaltation and has
been promoted in an attractive, fascinating and non-sterile literary modus. Its
hybridity is not an inhibition, but advantage. This hybridity is convenient for
the postmodern culture, which actualizes the synecdochic principal "the
totality of the part" (pars pro toto), which focuses on the
fragment, individuum, margin, and the periphery. Without such a synecdochic
projection of the world there would not be supplementing overcoding of the
fragments and episodes, which have a power to suggest a picture of the whole and
to re-signify the same one. Without it there would not be sophisticated and
intermedial experiments as a collage and montage, pastiche and palimpsest.
The paradigms of the short stories are differently situated in
different concrete historical and megacultural constellations (romanticism,
realism, surrealism, modern, high modern and avant-garde, postmodern…) Every
historical and sociocultural context creates its own empirical, terminological,
methodological and poetical construct of the short story, its own horizon of
expectations. That's why it is very difficult, if not impossible to speak about
one only distinctive characteristic in which all the sub-groups and every
concrete narrative text of whatever historical and sociocultural provenance can
be recognized.
The definitions of the short story today alternate between the
statistic enumeration and limitation of the pages, the number of the words and
signs on one side, and the pedantic (minutiose) terminological distinguishing of
the symptoms and measures of the non/ellipticity. That presents the novella as a
semi-category, whose terminological indication can be achieved only contextually
in a determined cultural system. All global attempts fall in a lightheaded
confusion. Every definition of the short story is historically and traditionally
determined. This unrepeatable, simple and "single art" (un art
singulier", Thierry Oswald, 1996, 3) follows the line of constant
pluralisation to its own conventions of the genre, that doesn't make the
conventions of the spoken genres which it enters in intertextual deal with
indifferent and untouched.
The short story's conventions are in the process of continuing
revision and pluralisation. It suggests an acceptable solution, the defining of
the short story to undergo a processual and plural procedure as well, with
selective inclusion of all respectable and acting principle, functions and
distinctions of the short story, from its historical origins until today. Maybe
with right, a group of theoreticians suggests the criterion "family
resemblances" (Ludwig Wittgenstein), understood as "a network of
similarities and correlations" that exist among the "individual
members of the genre, and in respect to the similarities between the
prototypical members in the genre of the short story".
(c) The oriental definition
- poetics and metaphysics of the narrow space
We will allow ourselves - beside everything - the necessary
freedom to compose a flash group portrait with a short story, emphasizing some
essential poetic positions and conventions of the narrative discourse and its
metalinguistic code, which are indicators of its peculiarity:
- an inauguration of the ellipticity from a formal
distinction in a distinction that produces essential stylistic, semantic,
syntactic, pragmatic and metalinguistic implications, considering that the short
story discovers itself meaningfully and philosophically through the poetics of
the narrow space, which excludes the ataraxy of the linear narration and
suggests, e.g. stimulates the chronological and semantic inversion;
- a predisposition of the short form for contacting the
structure, that results into forgetting with emphatic longing the epic aesthetic
material: remarkable absence of the narrative excursuses and descriptions, of
the supplemented details and comments, of the epic retardations and repetitions,
of the introduction/the prologue and epilogue;
- a frequent use of the restrictive procedures for limiting
and sublimation to degree of evident lyricism/poeticism of the narrative text;
- a latent tendency towards the "systematism" and
formalization of the discursive and morphological strategies (opposite to the
narrative texts, so that the short story is not just a serial of events but a
statement with higher, parabolic meaning - Stirl);
- a metamorphosis of the fictionality, characteristically for
the prose and dramatic literary kinds, from a primal to marginal sign: from a
tendency for emphasizing to a tendency for abolition and dosing of the
fictionality. Some narrative paradigms relay on the principal of creating
"an illusion of the reality" ("What I am narrating to you is mine
construct, a fiction, but I am narrating it convincingly as it were a
reality!"), others reject this principal and signalize the absence of the
fictional mediators of probable and possible actions with procedures for
disillusion and pseudo-fiction (What I am narrating to you is a real event, and
not an imaginary and virtual world);
- an attractiveness of the story, irrespectively of whether
it is contradictory in the syntagmatic combinations or in the semantic
implications (not only on the level of the fable, but on the level of a
discourse), that produces aesthetic ambiguity and multi-meanings of the
narrated, consequently are created three dominant models, (1) the model of
subversuion - grotesque, (2) of revelation - epiphany and (3) of atmosphere -
arabesque1;
- an effect of primariness, unity and actuality of the two
complimentary levels of (1)the discourse (syntagmatic, syntactic, composition,
formal construction) and of (2) the story (paradigmatic, semantic, pragmatic),
even when it comes from already known tradition and has entered the data base of
the cultural memory, considering the latent interest for actualization, remake,
revision, and variation of the mythical, legendary, biblical, archetypal and
epic situations (motive nomadism, intertextual communication);
- a flexibility of the form which enables creative
improvisations in the narrative act and nurture the feeling of freedom of
choice, considering that in the process of its inscribing the short story can
be: (a) romanized - a small roman, (b) poetized-a song in prose, (c) dramatized,
(d) essay-zed, (e) simulate orally in a kind of authentic record of other's
sermon;
- generic interdiscursivity and correlativity of the short
story with other pre-literary and boundary kinds: biblical, churchical, archaic,
historiographic, simple forms (anecdote, parabola, puzzle), with the diary,
memoirs, biography and autobiography, epistles;
- non-indifference towards the lectorate and the elements of
the meta-narrative dialogue with the reader, what specifies the reception of the
short story from the aspect the channels and mediums for communication, and from
the aspect of its reading and interpreting. That activates other social and
semiologic functions that the short story can do in a society.
1.
The allusion to the collection of novels by Edgar Allan Poe - Tales of
the Grotesque and Arabesque, we hope is obvious!
Translated by Katarina Cipusheva
© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
All rights reserved.
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