Lecture 37- Short Story in the Modern and Post-modern Era II

Back to the lecture series on Narrative Modern Fiction, we are talking about the short story in the modern and postmodern era. So, the short story as a genre, this is a continuation from our previous lecture. So, as the short story is situated at a varying crossroads, defining it as a genre has you know proved problematic to kind of give it, give some overarching umbrella features that can contain the entire form of short story is in fact challenging, because what we see in the postmodern era, the short story is being written in the postmodern era by authors like Borges, like Julio Cortázar, are experimenting as much with the genre as the novelists. And so, through these experimentations, we see the question of long story coming up with you know, with time, the events do not proceed in any direction, there is a kind of staggering movement where progression does not take place at all. So, the story goes on to become a non-story or a lack thereof, with passage of time, nothing happens really. So, and this is, Cortázar is a master of you know, postmodern short stories, the postmodern way of depicting short stories, he is showing us, the readers, how you know, maximalism and minimalism both being traits of postmodernist art, postmodernist literature, using of excess information or no information, both you know, delude the desire for narration, the desire for narrating a clear-cut story per se, story in the traditional sense, to have a clear-cut plot in the traditional sense, all these desires, you know, that reader carry with them, the traditional expectations of the reader are flouted. So, attempts at defining the short story have been diverse, short stories have been approached in terms of the quality of unity by Poe, Brander, Mathews, and then in terms of brevity, intensity and tension, as we see in the case of Oates, Bader, Friedman, Cortázar, in terms of lyricism as Lukács theorizes as well as Moravia. Then, through understanding the theme, such as O'Connor's theme of, you know, O'Connor's understanding of short story revolving around the theme of human loneliness, the question of insight, vision and mystery that is, that are raised by Eichenbaum, Charles May, Rohrberger, then hybridity, the question of hybridity by May and Pratt, the question of fractals by Leslie Murman Silko and that of closure by Gerlach. So, it is challenging to define, to determine which features distinguish the short story as a form from other genres and account for its unique nature. So, a range of different issues and perspectives go into informing the discourse of, the discourse on the genre of short story. So, Charles May, for example, focuses on the short story's origin in myth and oral storytelling. Mary Rohrberger focuses on its ineffability, its epiphany, short story is an epiphany. And then, we have Zavala talking about the issues of length in the form of contemporary attraction to minimalism. So, this is once again delving into the postmodern short story, both minimalism and maximalism, usage of very paired of expressions, bare minimum description characterizes postmodern short story as much as excess use of words and descriptions that lead to nowhere is also another feature of postmodern short story. So, concern with fragments, closure and frames as in the case of Ayn Ride and Perwinter's discussions and then critics are also interested in the generic affinities that the short story shares with the novel, the lyric, autobiography, letter writing, music, painting, poetry, sculpture and so on. So, Charles May notes that the link between sequence and significance, mystery and pattern, this blending of the trivial, the mundane with the extraordinary or the significant and the avoidance of explanations continue to be some of the most challenging generic difficulties. So, in the 1980s, some critics doubted that a definition of the short story could even be possible. Charles May used Wittgensteinian family resemblance theories, Wittgensteinian family resemblance theories which presuppose, you know, existing clusters of qualities, familial features and dominating characteristics that create a feasible description of the field. And yet, Mary Lewis Pratt believed that this was after all an impossible endeavor to tie the genre of short story to certain, you know, specific characteristics and traits. In this discussion, formalist, you know, critic Boris Eichenbaum says that the short story is a primary element in form with strong linkages to myths and entails compression and concentration, the unity of effect. I mean, rather than looking at how with lapse of time, with, you know, with passage of time events are occurring as we see in a novel, here we have an imagist understanding of the art, the art of short, the art and craft of short story, where we do not have as many characters as in the novel. It starts with some kind of extraordinariness and then there is a harmonious, you know, movement where the plot, the characters, the tonality, all are kind of converging towards the end. And so, the symmetry, the synchrony is, you know, predetermined to an extent. And that kind of design, that kind of symmetry is hardly betrayed in a traditional form of short story. Although this may not hold true in the case of modern and postmodern short story, once again, where there are so many experimentations where open ends are, you know, open ends are constantly, so authors are experimenting with open ends where a lot of information are not given. There are cases where a modern short story starts in somewhere in the middle and does not go back to explain the earlier phase. So, what happened earlier, the past keeps coming back only through flashback, the reader has no way of dwelling into the past because the narrator of the short story never takes the reader there. So, Ikenbom once again is talking about the unitariness, the unity of the effect, you know, compactness, compression and concentration, all of which inform the short story as a genre. And he says that the short story is a riddle. The conflicting allegiances of the short story to the narrative and the lyric are the subject of general analysis. So, in the short story, the intensity, tension, compression and suggestion of the lyric mode coexists with the qualities of storiness and narrativity. Like I said, the kernel, the grain of the plot is there at once and the organization of the short story more because of the fact that the time span is limited. The author has a kind of a shorter span within which to show his fineness, show her creativity. So, there has to be some predetermination, some, you know, schemes decided from beforehand, which acts on the plot of the short story. It is less plausible that a short story writer, like a novelist, is just going along with the characters, moving along with the characters to chase their fate, to pursue what is going to happen next to these characters. More or less, the short story writer knows what is coming in the end, even before the end comes. So, we know that the short story incorporates narrative elements like plot, character, development, conclusion and events into this brevity, this briefness and intensity very much like that of the lyric. The pattern becomes very important. It shares to a certain degree the characteristics of poetic language and poetic metaphor, since it operates through oblique storytelling, ellipses and implication, shunning the more explicit statements and causal effects that characterize longer, you know, prose words. And the short story emphasizes tone and imagery. Short story characters, like we will discuss in our ensuing lectures, short story characters can be formed as, through their literal, individual presence or position in the story, the individual meaning in the story, literal meaning in the story, as well as their symbolic, metaphoric presence in the story, where in the case of the latter, the reader usually journeys half the way and then it dawns to the reader that the character is not an individual alone, but stands for something else too. The character stands for a larger concept, for example. So, like novel, short story also draws on essay writing. It also has certain characteristics, certain features of epic, folk tales, religious works and ballads. Yet, being shorter than a novel or a novella, short story is usually compared with legends, myths and parables, such as the diverse episodes that concern Henry Fielding's novels. In his work, Complete Short Stories, Somerset Maugham suggests that the range of words typically used in a short story should be somewhere between 1600 and 20000. But this once again pertains to very stringent rules and these prescriptions are often undermined by experimental short story writers, where especially in the postmodern era, experimentation becomes one of the chief features. So, a short story is concerned with a scene, it could be a day's event, an episode, a conversation among different people. It could be based on fantasy or characters and a study of their psyche. So, Ernst Kasseider refers to the singleness of effect of a short story, which can be described as the highest degree of condensation. So, a short story's maximum economy targets intensity, suggestiveness and like I said, there is a poeticality, there is a kind of lyricism about the experience of both reading and writing the short story. In the theory of the novel, Georg Lukács argues that the lyric nature of the short story results from a process of selection, something that he calls as form giving, structuring, delimiting act that emphasizes the strangeness and ambiguity of life. So, according to Edgar Allan Poe, like the lyric poem, the short story should be read at one sitting. This is something Poe emphasizes now. So, a short story is a successful work if it can be read in one sitting. Because of its compressed structure, it makes sense when the journey is undertaken, completed in one sitting by the reader. The short story form lends itself to pictorial perceptions and these pictures are best understood in continuum when the reader is reading it at once. And so, they can be perceived in spatial terms by the reader, the pictorial depictions that the short story writer attempts. Isaac Dionysus says that the short story, so Isaac Dionysus goes to the extent of saying that novel sacrifices the story for the art of narration. So, in a novel, we emphasize so much on what Roman Jakobson would say, the literariness, the stylistic devices are so much at the fore, so much of experimentation is done with narrative poise, with the plot, with events happening in the course of time. So, time and temporality, where the stylistic devices come to the fore and take a precedence and they start dominating, they have a dominant role, the story takes a back seat. This is what Isaac Dionysus has to say. On the other hand, the short story's unified form gives more precedence to the story over the plot. So, we have these two things, the suset and the fabula. Right. So, the story and the plot. While the story is the bare skeleton, the plot is how this story is meant to operate over, meant to operate, how the events are operated, how the events work with respect to time. So, back and forth movement, the process of flashback, memorialization, all these things are part of plot making. Right. What Dionysus is trying to say is that in the course of emphasizing the plot in the novel, the story, you know, kind of takes a back seat, the artistry, the fineness of the author becomes more important. And so, Dionysus says that the novelist stands so much on the way of understanding the story in the novel, that novel can very much be called as a human product, whereas, so to say, in the beginning was the story. He is referring to the provenance of the short story to myths and ballads, to the Gothic tradition, to the tradition of, you know, to the Romantic tradition. And so, in the beginning was the story, according to Isaac Dionysus. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a famous work, had extrapolated from two earlier stories. One is the Prime Minister and the other is Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. Similarly, The Grain of Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway had been shown in his other work in our time. From these examples, what we understand is that the genres are created through a process of interspersing, intertextuality, influence and adaptation, where one draws on the other. Right. So, from the discussion of the short story as a form, we are going to now delve into one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, The Cask of Aventiado. So, let us just walk through some basic information about the author. Edgar Allan Poe was born in January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts and he died in 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was an American short story writer, poet, critic and editor and he is famous for his cultivation of mystery and macabre. His short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, initiated the modern detective story that we know today and the atmosphere of his tales of horror is unrivaled in the American fiction. His Raven, The Raven is understood as one of the best poems in the national literature. So, The Cask of Aventiado is a short story that is set in an unnamed Italian city in an undisclosed year. So, we do not get to know about the exact time and the space because it is also a story about confession of a murder that the narrator has perpetrated. So, there is, there are certain, it is within reason why the narrator who is not really penitent, it is once again another discussion whether the narrator is penitent, is regretting, is repenting his act of the past. But one understands that as a murderer that is a walking scot-free, it may not be safe to divulge too much about the city where he belongs and the time. So, it is most likely set in the 18th century and is told from the first person point of view. Like I said, the point of view of the narrator who is also the perpetrator, the murderer. It was the first, so it was first published, The Cask of Aventiado was first published in the November of, so in November 1846 issue of Gordy's Lady Book, a well-known American magazine. And we see Montresor, the protagonist as the narrator. So, The Cask of Aventiado by Edgar Allan Poe is a tale of murder, revenge, irony and horror. It is a criminal's description of a crime that the narrator Montresor had committed 50 years back for which he was never apprehended. And now, after so many years have passed, he wants to confess through this story. So, the word cask, cask of Aventiado, if you look at the title, the word cask refers to a wine barrel which comes from the same origin as the word casket which also suggests to a coffin. So, therefore, ironically, it refers to both the wine barrel and this chase for wine which dragged one of the characters to his coffin which led Fortunato to his coffin, the coffin of Fortunato. So, the cask has, the word cask has double meanings. It is a kind of pun in the story. It means the wine barrel, but also the wine barrel that becomes the coffin for the connoisseur of wine. A gallon barrel that can be stored in the cask. And so, Amontillado refers to Spain produced a sherry known as Montilla. So, now if we analyze the name, the word Montresor, it means my treasure. The story is narrated describes how he murdered a friend named Fortunato 50 years back. He comes from a well-known wealthy family and he lives in large palazzo with a staff of servants. So, Montresor talks, Montresor's talks are prepared with Latin and French words. We see that he held this vengeance against Fortunato who had committed numerous minor offenses against him. He is preparing inwardly to exact revenge in the true Jacobin spirit. So, he has this Jacobin spirit of taking revenge. He is preparing within himself to find that occasion where he can drag Fortunato to his coffin. So, we see that in the end, to just go to the end before we start to even walk through the story and analyze it. In the end, Fortunato is ardently pleading for mercy but this murderer narrator Montresor lures his companion, his friend into the darkest dungeons beneath the palazzo, binding him to the wall of a tiny alcove and then imprisoning him behind a fresh brick wall and then abandoning him, abandoning Fortunato to face death. The character of Montresor is fashioned of a different metal that is typically seen in Poe's horror stories. He, there is a kind of morbidity, a kind of inhumanity and even we could say an insane pleasure that this narrator is deriving at the thought of dragging his rival to his coffin, to his cask. So, Montresor is a ruthless man. He is quick witted. He is a planner. He has contrived the murder very carefully beforehand. He has manipulated the power of revenge taking and he has designed it in such a way which can be detected, like I earlier said, in the Jacobian revenge tragedies, the Jacobian revenge tragedies of England and he is a skilled utilizer of the twilight task. He represents the typical Machiavellian psyche. So, he is determined to find the right opportunity for taking revenge and he says that he has endured a thousand injuries of Fortunato. He vows revenge. He deliciously relishes the misfortune that Fortunato lands into. So, the unique burial itself in the story, in the end Fortunato is walled in and that is the dramatic irony with which the short story end. And we also have reference to this character named Lucchese. Lucchese who is familiar both with Montresor and Fortunato. He is kind of a common friend to both Montresor and Fortunato and he is a wine expert. He is a connoisseur of wine and he never appears quite in the plot, but his presence, his reference, allusion of Lucchese acts as a kind of catalyst, a kind of propellant that forces or that kind of, let us say, that impels Fortunato to follow Montresor. So, Montresor, Fortunato we have to understand that Montresor has studied Fortunato's character very well. He is a proud man. He is, one can assume that Fortunato is from an aristocratic background. He has a very affluent background and he is a very haughty man. He considers himself as a connoisseur of wine. He is, you know, he enjoys tasting different kinds of wine and so he cannot, you know, as is akin to his class and his nature, he cannot accept any kind of close competition. So, when, for example, Montresor says that I know this Lucchese who can, you know, taste and tell a wine better than you, Montresor, it does not go down well with Montresor. It acts as a kind of catalyst, a propellant like I earlier said and Montresor takes it as a challenge to say that I can taste and tell a wine and a Montreador better than Lucchese. So, he cannot take any competition. He assumes himself as unrivaled, as unparalleled, something which can be read as a reflection of his aristocracy, of his haughtiness that is innate to his class belonging. So, Lucchese is never there in the story, never quite there as a character, but his reference plays a pivotal role in, you know, dragging Montresor to his cast, to his coffin. So, his interest is, remains embedded in the story. The interest of Lucchese remains embedded in the story and his name is introduced in the story, like I said, to lure Fortunato to his tomb. Once again, this pride of Fortunato is exploited very cleverly, very shrewdly by Montresor. So, Fortunato, the name, if we look at the name Fortunato, it indicates fortunate, someone who is fortunate and yet ironically he meets death. He is an Italian friend of Montresor and he remains totally unaware of his friend's intentions, the revenge motive of Montresor and wine, you know, his desire to taste wine leads him to the grim world of death. And we see there is a comic sense. So, Fortunato's costume also has a comic sense to it and this comic sense makes the act of murder, an unsuspecting murder, a man that is caught unaware all the more gruesome. We see while, you know, Montresor leads Fortunato to the dungeon, his, the bells of his dress are ringing and he is compared to, and that is compared to the bells, the bell tied around the cattle's neck. So, we feel that a man who is totally caught unaware, who is drunk, who is tipsy and heady and he has no clue what he is, you know, what is going to happen next to him, to murder such an unsuspecting, you know, drunk man. There is some kind of, some sort of morbidity about this act, which the reader can constantly feel. The main theme, therefore, of the story is revenge. The narrator Montresor wanted to seek revenge on Fortunato in an effort to support his time-honoured family motto, ne mo ne impune lacessate, or no one assails me with impunity, no one can attack me without being punished. This was his family motto and he, in a way, lived up to it by seeking revenge, by taking a revenge and killing Fortunato at the right opportunity. The idea of revenge is repeated several times in the opening paragraph and Montresor being a very sly, a very, you know, scheming man does not rush to the act. He says that if we quote from the from the story, at length I would be avenged. He is determined to not only punish Fortunato, but punish with impunity. So, the terms of the revenge are quite clear in Montresor's mind. He will not feel fully revenged unless Fortunato realizes that his punishment comes at Montresor's hand. A wrong is not redressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt. As such to him who has done the wrong. He will do it slowly, but he will get his, you know, motive, you know, materialized. So, the story's tone derives from the patterns of irony that permeate and unify it. The victim's name and his fool's attire. Fortunato is celebrating a party and he is, you know, taken away from that party to taste the Monteado. He is dressed like a fool. It is almost, and we are talking about wine, he is dressed like a fool. There is a Dionysian mood almost. And the somber, you know, the somber and the Machiavellian, you know, thoughts that lurk underneath the danger that is, you know, about to come. There is no hint of such, you know, such perils, such dangers as far as Fortunato is concerned. So, his position is that of a half-conscious, helpless, drunk man. But the conversational exchanges between the protagonists are a really complex, we see, as they proceed towards the dungeon, the conversation that takes place. Montressor encourages Fortunato into the cellar by pretending to discourage him. So, he is prodding Montressor to his death by discouraging him. He tells him of its dangers and inconvenience. He knows that Fortunato likes challenges in life. So, he says that the cellar, you know, is full of dangers, it is inconvenient to reach the Amontillado. And then, he cunningly suggested, he cunningly suggests that Fortunato's rival Lucisi might be consulted in case Fortunato cannot brave the difficulty-ridden, you know, process of accessing the wine, it is better to consult his rival. So, all these contrivances, all these schemes have been plotted beforehand. We are going to stop our discussion here today, but I will also like for students to think how this relationship, this rivalry between, you know, between Fortunato and Montressor also has a class dimension to it. We see there is a point where Montressor talks about his, you know, ancestry, his forefathers being, you know, masons. So, we know that although Montressor is a wealthy man today, he does not hail from aristocracy. So, the rivalrous relationship that they share also root to their class origins, to their lineages, respective lineages. We are going to talk more about Montressor's lineage as a mason, his expertise in masonry, and how that, you know, has, that plays a role towards shaping him as a murderer. So, we will discuss more on this short story, The Cask of Amontillado in our next class. Thank you so much.