England

All literary forms have to some extent to be defined by negatives: drama is a way of telling a story that is not narrative, etc. This seems to me particularly so in the case of the short story, which did not come into its full power until after the rise of the novel. Such a judgment may seem odd in view of the presence in our tradition of so many masterpieces in short narrative form, down through the ages from the Old Testament through mediaeval literature to a master of the anecdote like Boccaccio. But to be a story and to be short does not quite make a “short story” in our modern sense; it really is a new genre, born in the nineteenth century and very quickly growing to maturity well before that century ended, and it defines itself against the novel; within the area of modern fiction, the short-story writer does those things that the novelist does not do. It sounds like a paradox, but is in fact the most sober statement of the matter that I can arrive at, to say that the shortness of a short story, its positive characteristic, is not particularly important; what is important is its negative characteristic, the fact that though it tells an imagined story it is not a novel. It has broken itself away from the novel so determinedly that since the appearance of the short story we have had to recognize the existence of an intermediate form to which we give the name of conte or nouvelle or novella. All these terms mean a story which can be short, almost as short as a long short story, and yet is not a short story but a kind of novel. (Characteristically, English has no word for this intermediate form, because the Anglo-Saxon mind, in its enthusiasm for empiricism, does not like making formal divisions within a subject, lest the forms should turn against it. We have, it is true, invented the word “novelette,” but that is something else; it implies a moral judgment; Miss X and Mr. Y write novelettes, not because they exploit the possibilities of this third form but because they do not go deeply enough into their subjects.)

So the short story, if I am right, had to wait, before attaining the franchise, until the novel had explored its main possibilities. And what does the novel .do? The novel is the most compendious of all literary forms; it has room for everything; D. H. Lawrence rightly remarked that if Hamlet had been a novel there would have been no mystery about it. (But, then, neither would it have been Hamlet.) The novel works by extracting all the meaning from the situation it deals with. Having put human beings into a certain situation, the novelist prods and prompts them until they move forward within that situation, exploring its dimensions, treading all the juice out of the grapes beneath their feet. If Jack and Connie love each other and Connie is unhappy with Mark, but on the other hand Jack respects Mark enormously and thinks of that respect as part of his own character, what will they do? And what will come of what they do? And what will they think and say about what comes of it? And so it goes on, like taking the mystery out of Hamlet. At each stage, alternatives appear and a choice is made, so that writing a novel (like living, perhaps?) is a matter of closing off possibilities; each time we have a choice between two possibilities and we choose one, the other ceases to be a possibility, it dies, and our lives, as we look at them, are marked by the gravestones of these possibilities we killed off, just as much as by the springing green life within those we assented to. A novelist, to try another metaphor, is like a man hollowing out a cave from the solid rock, and finding that the more he works, and the better he works, the smaller the cave becomes; in the end, he must break into the sunlight, on the other side of the mountain, through a space just big enough for one human being. This is because he must, as he works, close off one alternative after another, bringing his characters step by step to the only possible conclusion their story could have. If he has read their natures wrongly, if he has failed in his assessment of the situation he has put them in, the novel will go wrong and will strike the perceptive reader as false to experience. But in any case the author has to work like that, by a development of the situation which is always narrowing down, always tending to bring the characters to rest at a certain conclusion. Think of the immense range of possibilities in the opening chapters of Dr. Zhivago, and think how inescapably those possibilities are narrowed until we cannot but reach the brief doomed happiness at Varykino, and beyond it the agony of parting, the acceptance of suffering and inward collapse, and the heart attack on the crowded tramcar.