The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre by Florence Goyet

Author:Florence Goyet
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Published: 2014-01-21T12:50:40+00:00

From vision to judgement: guidelines for description

As we have seen, the classic short story usually depicts worlds that are socially or culturally unfamiliar. We might expect, therefore, to find an abundance of descriptions whose aim would be to inform us, to teach us the characteristics of the unknown object. But such descriptions are extremely rare. There are a few examples, as in Maupassant’s Le Colporteur (The Peddler): “As he approached I saw he was a hawker, one of those wandering peddlers who sell from door to door throughout the countryside”;35 or as in Mori Ōgai, when he describes Berlin for his Japanese compatriots: “It was one of those rooms called ‘garrets’ which overhang the street and have no ceiling”.36

However, among the hundreds of short stories I have studied, there are only a few instances of these potentially useful explanations. Instead, there is an abundance of descriptions that develop all the details of objects already known which create a distance between the reader and the subject. As we saw in Part I, it is a question of beginning with a pre-existing idea and developing this “type” in ways that do not necessarily challenge it. It is not — as in the case of the peddler or the garret — to teach the reader something he or she knows nothing about, but rather to replace an abstract concept with a vivid concrete image.

In the classic short story we may learn in detail about the life of Sicilian peasants and wandering comedians (Verga’s collection Don Candeloro e Ci [Don Candeloro and Company]), how one chops down an entire wood (Maupassant’s La petite Roque [Little Louise Roque]), the nature of a vendetta (Maupassant’s Un bandit corse [The Corsican Bandit]), life aboard a trawler (Maupassant’s En mer [At Sea]), or the life of brigands in the Middle Ages (Akutagawa’s Chūtō [The Brigands]).What these stories give us are the precise, picturesque and moving details of the scene. However, they do not change the abstract conception we already had of it. We were well aware that the life of itinerant traveling comedians is an inextricable mixture of grandeur and poverty. The short story is based on what is already known. It may take its time to detail the contours, and give life to a scene, but it can do this precisely because it does not need to create the essential concepts from scratch.

The problem is that these are not pure concepts in the reader’s mind — they come with connotations and values. When one relies on the reader’s knowledge of the objects, what is evoked is his preconception of them: the “atmosphere” surrounding them, the value judgements with which they are imbued. Descriptions in short stories are usually a “point of view” rather than an explanatory analysis. Thus Maupassant describes the peasant woman from Normandy explicitly as an archetype: “the true type of robust peasantry, half animal and half woman”.37

These descriptions remind us of the approach taken by Gustave Flaubert in his famous “lesson of description”. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.