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261 THE SHORT STORY IN EMBRYO By Lionel Stevenson (University of Houston) Among all literary genres, the definition of the short story is the most paradoxical. In its widest sense, as a brief fictitious narrative , it is the most ancient and most universal form of literature; in its narrower sense, as a self-conscious art form with rigorous technique, it is not much more than a century old and is produced by a sophisticated minority of meticulous artists. The archetypal brief narratives include folk legends, fairy tales, beast fables, exempla, fabliaux, even the parables of Jesus. In every region of the world, the professional story teller has been an essential element in primitive cultures. As soon as a culture becomes more complex, however, the brief narratives tend to expand and to agglomerate. Theories of epic origins assume that primordial short tales gradually came together to form the Iliad, the Mahabharata. or Beowulf. Episodes of chivalric adventure linked themselves into the romances, and these in turn accumulated into huge cycles, such as the Arthurian. Thus the evolution of the brief narrative into an independent art form was constantly frustrated by centripetal impulses. The strength of this impulse in a period of cultural sophistication is clearly illustrated in the silver age of Greece, in the high epoch of Arabic civilization, and again in Europe at the end of the middle ages. Apuleius in the second century, the Arabic authors in the tenth, and Boccaccio and Chaucer in the fourteenth were expert storytellers , but they could not rest content with retelling separate self-contained anecdotes. Their intention was to display simultaneously their versatility and their ability to create a large-scale work of art. The diversified comic, erotic, romantic or terrifying episodes in The Golden Ass are merged as adventures of a single hero and are made the vehicle for philosophical symbolism. The Arabian Nights, which seems to have taken its composite form in the tenth century , is held together by the device of Scheherezade·s suspenseful determination to sustain Haroun's attention. The Decameron frames its hundred tales in its portrayal of a group of Florentine fugitives from the plague. By an improvement on this method, The Canterbury Tales serves as a compendium of all varieties of the medieval short story, each handled with consummate skill, while the general prologue and the respective links merge to form an unmatched panorama of fourteenth-century society. The authors were probably motivated in part by a hope of transmitting their collected stories intact, instead of letting them be dispersed into insignificant fragments; and thereby they produced works of art with an over-all identity transcending the individual impact of each separate part. The process was vastly accelerated by the invention of printing. Within a century after Gutenberg, the full-scale book became established as the standard basis of literary achievement. The necessity of compactness , which prevailed as long as stories were ordinarily transmitted by the speaking voice, was no longer operative. Toward the end of the sixteenth century there was still a market for collections of 262 short stories, such as Painter·s Palace of Pleasure and A Petite Palace of Pettie His Pleasure; but these were already starting to seem archaic. In contrast, the rapid development toward the long novel can be observed not only in the vast prose romances like The Arcadia but more clearly in picaresque fiction. Such books as The Unfortunate Traveller and even Don Quixote are still largely episodic, but they acquire an over-all unity by being the exploits of an individual central character and by advancing, albeit digressively, toward a distinct climax. That this agglomerative urge is inherent in works of popular amusement has been proved again in our own era by the history of the two most successful vehicles, the comic-strip and the radio drama. The early comic-strips were totally self-contained, with a separate anecdote in each day's panel. Recurrent characters, however, such as Mutt and Jeff or Jiggs and Maggie, became familiar archetypes, and their personalities supplied a continuing theme. Eventually many of the cartoonists realized the advantage of adding suspense by maintaining the action through a long sequence. The early half...

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