Short Fiction

4. SHORT FICTION Clare Hanson. Short Stories & Short Fictions, 1880-1980. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. $25.00 Clare Hanson's Short Stories & Short Fictions, 1880-1920 falls somewhere between the scholarly study and the intuitive critical book. Not a historical survey—despite its title—the book sets out to trace through selected writers the formal types of short fiction in English during the first century of its modernist development. Hanson's strategy is to define several types based upon what she caUs their "narrative bias" ("short stories") or some substitute principle of organization such as the epiphany ("short fictions") or a loose accretive structure ("free story"). The roots of these types lie, for Hanson, in the 1880s proliferation of English periodicals publishing short fiction, especially the Yellow Book, and in the revival of Gothic romance, as exemplified in Stevenson's short work and, exotically, in Kipling's Indian tales. The strong narrative (or, more precisely, plot) thrust of the early Kipling and Stevenson is maintained by the writers Hanson caUs the "tale tellers' : Kipling (later), Maugham, and Saki, then Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and T. F. Powys. "Modemist short fiction," with its structural focus in a Joycean epiphany or, in Woolf s term, a "moment of being," emerges in Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield and—oddly enough—Gertrude Stein. This type is succeeded by a less austere, more hybrid form, the "free story," highly mimetic in character and Êlace, but minimal or even incoherent in plot. The term was created by lizabeth Bowen, one of the form's prime exponents along with V. S. Pritchett and, in Hanson's analysis, WUliam Sansom. A grab-bag chapter on "Postmodemist and Other Fictions" concludes the book with discussions of stories by Samuel Beckett, George Luis Borges, and the younger English writers Ian McEwan, Clive Sinclair, and Adam Mars-Jones. Some of the attractive things about the book are its handsome dust jacket and general physical quahty (which may be thought irrelevant, but as they are lacking in many new books, should be noted), its lack of jargon, its suggestion of possible ways of describing the development of short fictional forms in English, and some generous, sensitive analyses of individual stories. Less attractive are its lack of methodological rigor and of a sense of the multiple social and aesthetic contexts in which formal changes take place. By defining "narrative" as plot, and plot as a more or less obvious "happening" or "action" in the social world of the characters, Hanson boxes herself into an awkward terminology in which "story" is sometimes used to mean something lüce "fabula," but also sometimes limited to strongly plotted fiction. Along the way, "narrative" thus becomes useless as a descnptor of a characteristic of fiction in general. Hanson is on strong ground with her recognition of modernist fictions as focused in moments of oeing, both thematicaUy and structurally. Although she traces the concept only to Pater (and it clearly goes back at least to 98 Wordsworth's "spots of time"), it is demonstrably the formal center of Joyce's and Woolf s short fiction, as weU as that of many successors on both sides of the Atlantic. But many writers whose structures focus on epiphanies also place high emphasis on creating particular places and developing characters, contrary to Hanson's contention that the modernists were less interested in such things: Joyce is the primary example, but it seems to me that Mansfield often fits too, especiaUy in the New Zealand stories. Even if, as Hanson contends, most contemporary students do not recognize that "The Garden Party" and "The DoU's House" do not take place in England, their settings are particularized and important to the story, if not as "New Zealand" per se, then as modelings of strong social themes, in which class-consciousness is bodied forth in the story s geography. (As the settings depict a colonial society emulating England, one might expect them to be distinguishable only with difficulty, even to contemporary English students.) On the other hand, a writer of the "free story" such as Bowen also depends for stmcture upon epiphanies: one weU-known example is "Her Table Spread," but others include...