SOURCE: Levy, Andrew. “Back Home Again: Bobbie Ann Mason's ‘Shiloh.’” In The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story, pp. 108–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Levy discusses the short story “Shiloh” and how it fits into the overall history of the short story genre.]

In 1980, Bobbie Ann Mason's first major short story, “Shiloh,” appeared in the New Yorker.¹ The story was an immediate critical success. It was reprinted in Best American Short Stories in 1981, and became arguably the most heavily anthologized short story of the last decade; the collection that followed, Shiloh, and Other Stories (1982), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction.² Mason's distinctive style traits—popular culture references, present tense, blue-collar and rural subject matter—have, with or without her direct influence, become dominant trends in the contemporary American short story. She is considered one of the chief representatives of a school of fiction variously named “dirty realism,” “K-Mart realism,” or “minimalism”: linguistically spare, thematically populist, and consciously antiliterary.³ This school developed such vogue during the 1980s that Mason's own work went from being perceived as a “refreshing” or “improbable” change from what usually appeared in commercial magazines and literary journals, to being the exemplar of one of the two kinds of fiction found in those venues. “If,” in the words of Lila Havens, “Ann Beattie is giving us ‘bulletins from the front’”—portrayals of middle- and upper-class angst—Mason is “telling us what it's like back home.”⁴

Back home, of course, is a place the American short story has spent a great deal of time. From the 1830s and 1840s, when Eastern magazines and newspapers published anecdotes of frontier life gathered from papers and readers in the South and Southwest, the short story has always been a site of discourse in which a comparatively well-educated, middle-class audience could read about the fictionalized lives of the more marginal participants in the American political project. The major trends in short fiction during the nineteenth century—realism, local color, dialect—all told stories about rural residents, the poor, and ethnic minorities, in magazines distributed to audiences that either had no link with those socially disenfranchised groups, or had left them “back home.”⁵

In the twentieth century, these trends continued, in new transformations. As described in Chapter 2, regional, ideological, and ethnic literary movements were spearheaded by the evolution of a system of “little” magazines that, with their shoestring budgets, provided for the distribution of editorial power among economically marginal groups.⁶ At the same time, numerous authors and critics argued that the short story, for structural reasons, was the art form best suited for the description of a heterogeneous culture of “submerged population groups”—the American melting pot.⁷ This vision of the short story was then realized in published form within the modern anthology, with its all-but-invisible editor and seemingly unranked inclusion of a multitude of individual voices, which appeared like an ideal metaphor for a diverse and democratic culture. Institutionally, historically, and structurally, everything about the short story implied heterogeneity—everything, perhaps, except the audience, which at its apex consisted of perhaps the upper one-fifth of the social pyramid, and which now rarely extends beyond the comparatively small and homogeneous readership represented by the circulation lists of the New Yorker and the university presses.⁸

Mason's work is infused by many of these same tensions and ambitions. She writes stories of blue-collar Kentuckians for the decidedly nonblue-collar readers of the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review. Having earned a Ph.D. in literature and composed (and published) a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's difficult Ada, she nevertheless has crafted an antiliterary narrative style, and authorial persona to match: Laughing at an interviewer's insistence that she “must know some big words,” for instance, Mason responded that “I don't say them out loud.”⁹ In this context, it is worth wondering precisely how much cultural distance separates the Atlantic publishing one of Mason's blue-collar tales in the name of “dirty realism” in 1983, and publishing a story composed entirely in a Newfoundland patois and lauding its “realism” in 1862.¹⁰ Although Mason's writing is often represented as somehow radical, it is difficult to resist the observation that her populism, and the populism of other “dirty realists,” is almost entirely consistent with the ideological composition of one hundred and fifty years of American short story telling.

In this event, the nature of Mason's innovation might not be her much-lauded populist edge, which is neither particularly populist nor innovative. Rather, Mason represents a significant chapter in the history of the short story because of the extent to which she combines many of the century-old narrative strategies of the American short story with a peculiarly postmodern (and postliterate) self-consciousness. Susan Sontag, in the epigraph that prefaced this chapter, observes that one way an American writer copes with life in an anti-intellectual culture is by playing dumb. If America is anti-intellectual because intellectualism constitutes an ostentatious show of superiority that is anathema to democratic culture, however, then the American writer has a second option: He or she can create fiction that undermines the myth structure from which intellectualism (and authorship) has drawn its power. That writer can attempt to ‘democratize’ literature by using models of authorship, narrative, and protagonism that suggest authors and heroes work within a community, rather than rise gloriously and rebelliously above it.

In doing so, of course, the author risks undermining his or her own authority. The short story “Shiloh” illustrates how Mason has developed a narrative strategy that combines radically democratic visions of creative activity with a residual faith in what she calls the “alienated, superior sensibility.”¹¹ It is a highly seductive strategy, one in which the author balances the conflict between the desire to celebrate oneself and to celebrate one's community by consciously and conscientiously playing dumb, as though playing dumb was, in itself, another American art form. It is also a strategy in which the traditional energies of the short story have provided an institutional and intellectual framework within which Mason and other “dirty realists” could operate, and thus add another chapter to the long and thriving history of one class of Americans writing about another.

THE GOOD LIFE

I didn't understand the conflict between the type of mind I had and the type of mind I was trying to be.

Bobbie Ann Mason, “Conversation” 133–4.

In published interviews, Mason has been straightforward about the tension inherent in her fiction between home and away-from-home. When asked in 1984 how the people in her hometown—the kind of “everyday people” that populate her stories—have reacted to her success, she responded that “since I hardly know anybody there, I don't really know.” She similarly observed that “lower-middle class people”—again, the residents of her stories—“don't have much access to fiction,” and would probably “rather be reading Princess Daisy” than her work. Despite these limitations, Mason clearly perceives her fiction as having populist ramifications. Her stated ambition is to include in high-culture discourse the kind of characters and models for narrative that would normally be excluded:

Throughout American literature, the hero was the alienated superior sensibility, the artist, the sensitive young man. I read so much of that in school that by the time I was ready to write, I was sick of reading about that guy, and I thought, “At least he could be a woman,” or maybe someone who was not sensitive and not superior. I think that's how I finally arrived at knowing who I was going to write about …

For Mason, the issue is not who reads literature, but what kinds of lives are considered worthy of being literature. She perceives herself as part of a larger populist “cultural shift” where the spread of education and wealth allows the “masses” to get access to the “good life”; and just as the masses get access to the good life, Mason gets them (and herself, the daughter of dairy farmers from western Kentucky) access to the ‘good’ magazines. The result is that, in theory at least, high-culture discourse is transformed and democratized by this infusion of “popular culture,” and that “suddenly,” in Mason's phrase, “we're discovering that store clerks and cowboys also have valid lives.”¹²

Initially, the critical response to Mason's fiction focused on this aspect of her work, on how she seemed to be crossing demographic barriers by presenting her “farmers, store clerks, and truck drivers” in the elegant typescript of the Atlantic or Harper and Row publications.¹³ The New York Times wrote that “the gap to be bridged empathically between her readership and her characters was formidable.” The Chicago Tribune wrote that “the details of her characters' lives must seem as remote as Timbuktu to the readers of the New Yorker or the Atlantic.” The temptation to consider her fictions valuable simply because they contained factual data about an “exotic culture” was so strong that the Village Voice critic reminded his readers that Shiloh, and Other Stories “was not anthropology.” These critical reactions indicate that what made Mason's work exciting in 1982 was not just what she said, but where she said it. She was genuinely perceived as having infused high- and middle-culture sites of publication and readership with a realistic, uncondescending dose of low culture—and, more important, as having somehow bridged an empathetic gap that divided Americans into those separate classes.¹⁴

These are, of course, high-culture voices who are deciding what constitutes a realistic, uncondescending portrait of low culture. Mason has said that she has heard “rumors” that some residents of her hometown who have read her fiction dislike it because it makes them seem “too much like country people.”¹⁵ It is, in fact, almost too easy to deconstruct Mason's populism (and the cheerful response it has received), given that the entire project is virtually invisible to the classes of people it is supposedly empowering. Her literary politics are founded upon the troubling and decidedly unpopulist assumption that “store clerks' lives” are valid only to the extent that they are discussed in the New Yorker and taken seriously by an upper-middle-class audience. Similarly, her critics (if not necessarily her readers) do not question the possibility that her work might not be a “realistic” vision of lower-class life at all, but an imaginative reconstruction that appeals to an upper-middle-class audience for many reasons, some of them potentially antagonistic. Given her own tension regarding her Kentucky roots—she has spoken of feeling “threatened” by home, but recently relocated there from Pennsylvania—the possibility that her fiction contains ambivalent impulses toward home is rarely considered.¹⁶

Just as the praise for Mason fails to account for the possibility that her success might have more to do with the empathy she shares with her readership than with her characters, however, these criticisms ignore the possibility that Mason herself is both conscious of, and fascinated with, these very issues. Thus, although Mason has congratulated herself for ‘validating’ lower-class lives, she more often observes that the “strength of my fiction has been the tension between being from there and not from there.”¹⁷ She has similarly suggested the popularity of her fiction can be attributed to the large number of people who, like her, have left behind blue-collar upbringings and joined a rising middle class. For that audience, reading her stories, like writing them, constitutes an act of reconciliation with the home that is left behind:

My work seems to have struck a chord with a number of readers who have left home and maybe who have rejected it, and I think it startles them because they thought they were rid of it …¹⁸

For Mason, her work appeals to a broader audience because she brings to a high-culture site of discourse the sort of popular culture references and concerns that she believes have been repressed from high-culture discourse. The “home” that is left behind is not just rural Kentucky, but the “popular culture” that is repudiated (or diluted) by a rising middle class, or an entrenched upper class. As Mason recognizes, however, the repression of that popular culture is rarely complete: The appearance of her K-Mart brand names and rock music references on the pages of the New Yorker represents something like the bubbling up of a political subconscious, intruding itself on high-culture lives in a manageable form.

In many ways, Mason's consciousness of class difference is the key to her fiction. She has said that “it's the most extraordinary thing to move out of your class,” and the quote resonates across virtually every aspect of her narrative project.¹⁹ Not only does it describe her own rise from the daughter of dairy farmers to respected writer, but it also seems to describe her stories themselves, which appear like representatives of an entrenched underclass in sites of discourse in which that underclass theoretically rarely finds a voice. As she herself suggests, most of her audience is also displaced out if its class of origin, and finds her stories appealing for the reconciliation they offer. And, unsurprisingly, class and cultural displacement are also the major thematic matter of her stories: The New York Times, for instance, wrote that “ominous forces of disorientation are loose in Masonland,” and observed that Mason's stories invariably deal with the personal and emotional consequences of sweeping social change.²⁰

In this context, whether or not Mason is a working-class heroine is not a relevant issue. If the most significant aspect of her fiction is the manner in which it seems to jump across demographic barriers (while dealing thematically with the consequences of social dislocation), then we should value that jump (and her exploration of the consequences) as the central element of her work, not a tangential one. Caught between her sympathy for the underclass and her desire to run away from it, Mason has constructed a body of fiction and a narratology for the rising middle class, a way of telling stories that tries to balance the dictates of a radical populist program with an affection for the individual that rises above populism. “Shiloh” provides the first, and best, example of that narratology.

COUNTRY PEOPLE

The two protagonists of “Shiloh,” Leroy and Norma Jean Moffett, are not in control of their lives. Rather, they appear to be moved by larger external forces which they only dimly recognize and certainly do not understand. The most active force in “Shiloh,” for instance, appears to be the feminist movement, which makes its way to the Kentucky couple through a television set broadcasting Donahue.²¹ The story presents Norma Jean's evolution toward what Donahue himself might call “self-actualization” (she takes college courses, begins working out, gets a job, and eventually tells Leroy that she wants a divorce), and Leroy's lapses toward a childlike confusion. Her movement toward fulfilling some ideal of individuality, however, is mitigated throughout by her confusion over the reasons for her actions. When Leroy asks Norma Jean if her request for a divorce is a “women's lib thing,” for instance, she answers, “don't be funny”; later, she adds “I don't know what I'm saying. Forget it.”²²

Similarly, Leroy, who has come to realize that “he never took time to examine anything,” nevertheless “forgets where he hears things anymore,” and seems lost in nostalgic fantasies of starting over, exemplified by his desire to build a log cabin as their ‘new’ homestead. Neither he nor Norma Jean seems to recognize the stress that losing their baby several years earlier has had on their marriage, even though Leroy recalls having heard “that for most people losing a child destroys the marriage.”²³ Fittingly, Norma Jean's announcement that she wants a divorce takes place in a cemetery, where Leroy seems to sense the link between his failing marriage and death in general, but cannot quite make the more personal connection between his imminent divorce and the loss of their son: “Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard.”²⁴

That final scene is set, appropriately, at a National Historical Site, the Civil War battleground at Shiloh, Tennessee. Leroy, attempting to explain the failure of his marriage, widens his perspective and seeks to locate his and Norma Jean's place within a larger scope of historical change:

General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground …

Leroy's epiphany, however, comes not when he successfully locates his place in history, but when he recognizes his inability to understand the forces of social change that have affected his life, an inability reflected in his rote listing of battleground names and family milestones. In a central line, Mason poetically describes these forces as “the insides of history”:

Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him …

At this point, Leroy recognizes his desire to build a log cabin as a refusal to adjust to social change, and dedicates himself to “get moving again.” This optimistic moment is undermined by the very conclusion, however: Leroy, with one bad leg and one leg asleep, barely capable of “moving” in any sense, nevertheless strides hopefully toward Norma Jean, who is gesturing in what is either a welcoming wave or a muscle exercise designed to increase her own strength. The story ends at that ambiguous moment: It is as if Leroy's recognition that he has not understood the “inner workings” of past events is no guarantee that he will understand them in the future.²⁵

The third-person narrator, interestingly, seems to be in a similar position. The story is told in an artfully awkward prose, on a level of vocabulary equivalent to that of Leroy and Norma Jean (Mason has said, probably exaggerating, that she limits herself to a six-hundred-word lexicon).²⁶ Just as Norma Jean and Leroy seem confused over the reasons for their own behavior, the narrator seems unwilling or unable to locate, and emphasize, the ‘meaningful moments’ within the story. “Shiloh,” like most of Mason's stories, has a flat texture, seems unplotted, and ends with an ambiguous and elliptical image (“The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed”) that provides no sense of closure.²⁷ Superficially at least, Mason refuses to appear any more in control of the narrative than her characters are in control of their lives.

In doing so, she creates an authorial persona that is bound empathetically to the lives of the people she believes to be trapped inside history. She is unafraid of analyzing herself from the same historicist perspective, even though that perspective often undercuts her own authority by implying that she is not in control of the process of composition:

I can't analyze it in detail and I'm not sure I can say why I choose to write that way, or even if I choose. I think things like that must be determined by larger social forces …²⁸

Much of what Mason says about her own work is informed by this same self-deprecating, and antiliterary, perspective. Responding to a student's complicated interpretation of the dust-ruffle image that closes “Shiloh,” for instance, she denies knowledge of the implications the student found, and instead observes that she writes “innocently.”²⁹ Similarly, she has described her decisions about plot and closure in terms that suggest she dislikes making conscious choices about composition, and prefers instead to do anything she can to “get at that subconscious”: “When you're writing a story, there comes a moment when it feels right to quit. Sometimes that just happens … It comes out of a feeling … It's—I'm not used to being analytical about it.”³⁰ In describing her own work process as a sequence of unplanned choices dictated by subconscious or external forces over which she has little control, Mason creates a vision of her own creative activity that is identical to her vision of the lives of her characters, and that is modeled on a distinctly historicist perspective on behavior. Just as she says that her stories are composed “innocently,” and conclude at a moment she has neither planned nor analyzed afterward, her characters “don't think of their lives as a story with coherence: They're just in it, they don't know what's going to happen next or why anything's happening.”³¹

This is, as Sontag notes, an old game; but Mason practices it with unusually intricate self-consciousness. Unlike her characters, who appear both trapped within history and unable to recognize its influence on their lives, Mason's knowing “innocence” is coordinated with a deliberate effort on her part to control the effect of external conditions on her creative output. Her acceptance of these effects, in turn, places her in a position of both superiority over and sympathy with her characters: sympathy, because she accepts her own helplessness as well as theirs; superiority, because she recognizes and identifies them, and makes them major elements in her empowerment as a writer. In an interview with Lila Havens, for instance, Mason echoes Norma Jean's comments on the feminist movement, but with a telling difference: Where Norma Jean denies that feminism is a factor in her behavior, Mason notes that she “internalized” feminism, and then “moved on”—that is, she consciously accepted an external social movement into her subconscious, so that it would become an element in her “innocent,” socially unaware poetic.³² It is the precise difference enacted in her demographic relationship to her characters: Norma Jean and Leroy Moffett and Mason were all born and raised in lower-middle-class rural Kentucky, but while the Moffetts labor at rising above or repudiating the conditions of their lives, Mason has “moved on,” acquired a Ph.D., and gained control of those same conditions (and the Moffetts themselves) as the resources of her fiction.

In a like manner, she denies being explicitly “political,” but her thoughts on the purpose of her writing are laced with phrases such as “class struggle,” suggesting that she has also, to some extent, internalized Marxism, and then moved on. This internalization of Marxist ideology is perhaps the most crucial aspect of her fiction. Throughout interviews, she has used the term “superior sensibility” (or variants thereof) to describe the model for fiction she believes has been unnecessarily dominant in the past.³³ In its place, Mason substitutes a model for the behavior of characters in fiction in which they move in coordination with communal values, or are moved (hesitatingly or not) by the force of those communal values. Similarly, her model of authorship appears to disdain the notion that the serious writer is a superior sensibility by presenting narrators and implied authors that seem neither more alienated nor more sensitive than their characters: “I don't feel superior to these people,” Mason notes of her subjects, “I feel I'm luckier.”³⁴

THE INSIDES OF HISTORY

As mentioned earlier, “Shiloh” has been one of the most anthologized stories of the 1980s; along with selections from Jayne Anne Phillips, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and a handful of other authors, Mason's story has been consistently selected by textbook and commercial anthology editors as a representative of the best the 1980s short story had to offer.³⁵ In a significant sense, the popularity of “Shiloh” provides a further illustration of the most radical implications of Mason's narratology, and the kinds of publishing patterns that would be produced by the institutionalization of that narratology. The inference of Mason's poetic is that worthy fiction is not produced by individuals who control the resources of their fiction and the circumstances of its reception, but by individuals who respond “innocently” to a mixture of external and subconscious forces. In the past, it has been a commonplace of literature that special individuals might possess this special innocence—they might, for instance, be the Aeolian Harps through which God chose to communicate to Man. But the peculiar nature of Mason's repudiation of the alien, superior sensibility is that it widens the franchise of “innocence” to people who lack any special spiritual insights or charismatic gifts of artistic ability, as well as to those who have no knowledge of tradition or craft. She widens the franchise of potential artists to those who are truly “innocent,” and respond “innocently” to external social forces—which is to say, virtually everybody. This model of creative activity, carried to its institutional fulfillment, would justify a system of publication and canonization where multivocal sites of discourse such as anthologies or magazines dominate, and where conservative assumptions about the consistent quality of an author's oeuvre are replaced by greater accessibility to the processes of publication and canonization.

Mason's own descriptions of the composition of “Shiloh” and her other early stories vividly illustrate the degree of her commitment to this model. Rather than describing the act of writing (about which she is almost consistently unforthcoming), Mason focuses on the correspondence between herself and Roger Angell of the New Yorker, who rejected nineteen of her stories before accepting one:

We developed a correspondence and he really encouraged me a great deal, and I got very excited about what I was doing and worked very hard. Usually what he told me were not bits of advice on revising but just sort of subjective responses about the central reasons he didn't think they could publish the story, and he would offer a general criticism … it was fairly general, but usually he would make one or two comments that would hit right at the problem with the story, and it would give me something to think about. …³⁶

As Mason describes it, “Shiloh” and her personal writing style were the product of a lengthy, impressionistic dialogue between herself and Angell who, as fiction editor of the New Yorker, might reasonably be called a living metonymy for the short-story publishing establishment. That her personal style could be perceived as the product of an engagement between herself and an external representative of the publishing community, rather than the product of some isolated, alien poesis, is a possibility that Mason characteristically does not seem to mind.

In fact, “Shiloh” itself, with its reliance on historicizable forces and the present tense, seems to invite the interpretation that it was generated by a moment of interaction between editor, author, genre, and culture, rather than by a isolated author. Mason relentlessly uses brand names, and references to songs that are popular at a given point in time, to historicize her stories to points in history (responding to a question about why she refers to songs and cultural figures by name in In Country, for instance, Mason says that “In Country was in the summer of '84. There are only a few years in which that story could take place”).³⁷ In effect, this use of popular culture references creates a special language that not only dates the story to a specific moment in time but also makes it less readable as the years pass after its publication. These are all factors that justify “Shiloh”'s presence in current anthologies as a representative of the kind of short stories contemporary culture has to offer to the tradition. These factors also moderate the criticism Mason so often receives for writing “New Yorker-type stories”—a contemporary subgenre (to be distinguished from the “New Yorker” stories of previous generations) that she, in fact, did much to help create. As a study of her poetic clearly indicates, composing a story that contained within itself the unconscious traces that define a community was the entire point of her creative efforts, not an awkward after-effect.

These factors also suggest that “Shiloh” will not be so heavily anthologized in the future, unless contemporary culture remains static enough so the special language of popular culture references means as much in 2002 as it did in 1982. To a certain extent, Bobbie Ann Mason is writing a kind of disposable literature: serious fiction that addresses specific moments in time, which could be written only in specific moments in time, and that is initially published in sites of discourse (magazines) that are themselves more disposable than the bound volumes within which serious writing is usually enveloped. Friction occurs when this ideology clashes against more conservative assumptions about authorship: When, for instance, Mason herself keeps writing and publishing, she is implying that she can continue deliberately to produce those extraordinary moments when a community interacts with an individual (or an individual interacts with her subconscious) to produce a memorable story, a notion that contains within itself the main elements of the alien, superior sensibility with a uniquely Marxist twist.

Of course, Mason has continued writing and publishing her stories in bound volumes. The irony of Mason's philosophical flexibility concerning external social forces is that it accommodates the kind of self-deprecation that might be expected from a beginning, but not an established, author. That flexibility is part of a narratology for a rising class of people with divided sympathies; but not for an entrenched one. And a survey of the interviews Mason has granted in the seven years since her initial success suggests that as she has grown more confident with her own authorship, she has also repudiated the self-deprecating models of behavior that formed the philosophical underpinning for her rejection of the alien, superior sensibility, and—to some extent—for her preference for the short story.

In an early interview, for instance, she dwells on her relationship with Roger Angell and the New Yorker, and speaks in modest terms about her own critical success: “I'm still really quite surprised that my work has made the impression it has.”³⁸ More recently, however, she dwells on the fact that she now composes alone, and shows her work to no one prior to sending it to her publishers. In a similar manner, her stance toward the alien, superior sensibility has altered considerably. In an interview conducted in 1989, Mason describes her evolution as an artist, and describes her repudiation of that sensibility using the same anecdote found in earlier interviews, but with a crucial twist at the conclusion:

I thought, “Well, I'll write a kind of Huckleberry Finn novel about a girl. I won't write about the sensitive young man, won't write about the artist, the sensitive youth coming of age. I'll write about somebody who is insensitive, and who doesn't wear glasses.” And I found out that you couldn't do that! There's no story there …³⁹

Interestingly, though, there is no conspicuous way to tell from Mason's fiction exactly when she made this discovery; her subject matter and her major themes have remained comparatively unchanged, and it could be easily argued that her most recent novel, In Country, is very much a kind of Huckleberry Finn about a girl. All Mason seems to have discovered, rather, is the point where her life has finally diverged completely from those of her characters—where her private story cannot be told without a sensitive artist figure performing at the center, and possibly wearing glasses.

“WRITE WHAT PLEASES YOU”

Mason's ethos of fiction represents a forceful embodiment of the major ideological concerns that have surrounded the development of short fiction in this country. It is impossible to miss the resemblance between William Carlos Williams's paradigmatic claim that the brevity of the short story matched the “heterogeneity” and “brokenness” of lower-class lives, for instance, and Mason's own belief that the lives of the underclass do not follow structured plot lines, and require a new kind of ‘story’ (or, for that matter, Raymond Carver's observation that writing a novel was impossible while he had to think about paying the rent).⁴⁰ It is equally difficult to ignore the echoes of Poe's affinity for disposable literature in Mason's celebration of the present tense. Bret Harte's conscious regionalism, James Farrell's Marxist exasperation with traditional short story forms, and Edward O'Brien's over-the-top exclamations about ethnic inclusion all resonate in Mason's faith in the populist possibilities of her fiction. In general, the two most widely circulated canons of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding short fiction are that the genre is easy to read and to write, and that it therefore represents a significant alternative to older modes of determining literary value; Mason's self-deprecating efforts to restructure the form somehow capture both the abnegating and ambitious aspects of these two canons, and with the kind of attentiveness to communal voices that seems entirely typical of Mason's work.⁴¹

In particular, however, one aspect of Mason's fiction—what she calls the tension between “from there” and “not from there”—is especially central to attempts to understand the historical development of the American short story, as well as its current state. To the extent that the short story had radically democratic implications, those implications have been played out within high- and middle-culture spheres. For this reason, it is significant that the short story was accepted, however tentatively, as a genre of high literature, as opposed to being identified as a genre of popular culture. Within the field of popular culture, the short story would be considered the least democratic of art forms; but among a play of literary genres consisting of novels, poetry, and drama, the short story as it developed in the late nineteenth century clearly represented the most accessible, most easily written, and most widely dispersed form of high literature. This distinction, in turn, illustrates how the short story was never a democratizing project in the purest sense, but part of an attempt to infiltrate high-culture discourse with middle- and low-culture influences—while leaving the aristocratic underpinning of high literature intact. Throughout its existence, the short story project has been an attempt to wrest “literature” from genres (i.e., the novel, lyric poetry) and sites of publication (i.e., bound volumes) that were associated with a European (and upper-class American) form of cultural capital that even a newly moneyed bourgeois aristocracy could not buy itself into. It was the literary icon of the rising middle class.

All of these factors clearly resonate within Mason's fiction. Just as her creative activity mediates between genuinely populist impulses and faith in the ideology of individualism, the development of the short story in America has been marked by the tension between these two conflicting beliefs. Specifically, because the short story project never completely questioned the aristocratic underpinning of literature—the faith that certain texts and certain individuals were intrinsically better than others—it was placed at a natural disadvantage within a purely literary discourse among genres that did not have to bear the burden of being associated with attempts to level definitions of excellence. The consequence is that even contemporary critics and students of the short story often perceive it as a site of discourse where the community, in the form of mercantile considerations or academic guidelines, exercises a restrictive amount of control over the individual artist. For many, this belief is corroborated by the brevity of the short story itself, which seems somehow to restrain the writer, in contrast to the freedom he or she might practice within the wide open spaces of the novel. Mason, for instance, has described the short story as a “constrained” form, and has spoken of the things that an author cannot do within those limitations.⁴²

This was, however, a natural consequence of the manner in which the American short story had been sold to the American reading and writing public. The immense, almost universal popularity of Edgar Allan Poe and his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) within discussions of the American short story illustrates the extent to which future short story practitioners and proponents had accepted that their genre would be associated with Poe's hyperconscious (and possibly hoaxing) insistence that the composition of high literature was a quantifiable process within which intuition played no part whatsoever.⁴³ This insistence that the short story could be defined scientifically by someone other than the author dovetailed smoothly with ideological arguments that claimed that the short story was America's art form, and could therefore be defined not according to practice, but according to what the individual observer believed America's art form should represent.⁴⁴ It similarly addressed the desires of both the magazine and academic establishments, which could profit substantially by claiming that the individual short story had to respond to a set of predetermined rules. The result of this conflation of institutional desires and ideological arguments was that by 1930, the short story had been subjected to a veritable avalanche of definitions, theoretical treatises, and best-selling how-to handbooks.

And even after the death of the short story as a commercial genre, this definitional energy remained a fact of the genre. The entire system of graduate programs and creative writing courses that has developed in the last forty years would have been an impossibility without a founding ideology that claimed that the composition of high literature was a craft that could be quantified and taught.⁴⁵ This same ideology, with a slight twist, also empowered the New Critics, who made the short story a staple in high school and college English courses by recognizing that the relative length of a short story implied that it had been better crafted than a novel, and would better reward close reading (and would also make it more easily taught, a nontrivial pragmatic issue).⁴⁶ If, in other words, the short story has been consistently attacked as a site of formulaic writing, it has been for reasons that are grounded in the most forceful celebrations of the genre—that it is a site of discourse where the community has a say in the composition process.

And so, despite the fact that the short story was the literary icon of a rising and entrepreneurial middle class, rhetoric about the short story could subvert in remarkable ways the ideology of individualism upon which that rise was based. Walter Pitkin, for instance, one of the leading writers of how-to short story handbooks during the period of their great popularity, dispensed advice that derided even the most innocuous defense of individualism:

What you should do is to get interested in the same subject matter and in the same problems of modern life which the successful writers are dealing with. And then form your own impressions and opinions about these and write what pleases you in the popular language of the day. One of the most pernicious pieces of advice ever given to young writers was that famous utterance of O. Henry: “There is only one rule to success in literature. Write what pleases you.”⁴⁷

Pitkin's advice is especially striking because it was directed toward a generation of young middle-class Americans who saw the short story as an opportunity to make money and be artists at the same time—an idyllic conflation of bourgeois and aristocratic ideals founded specifically on the desire to do exactly what “pleased you.” But what is also striking about Pitkin's advice is that, with his recommendations to internalize external social movements and write in “the popular language of the day,” it greatly resembles Bobbie Ann Mason's own approach to writing fiction.

This statement is not made even remotely to suggest that Mason was influenced in any way by Pitkin, any other short story handbook writer, or any explicit knowledge of the development of the short story in this country. The resemblance between her approach and Pitkin's is cited here because it illustrates how the decision to write short stories, then as well as now, constitutes an archetypal response to the conditions of American culture. Just as Pitkin wrote explicitly for an audience of would-be artists that chose the short story over other genres because it conferred a degree of bourgeois respectability, Mason developed a literary politics that balanced an immense sympathy toward popular culture (she has joked in interviews that she is a writer because she is too shy to be a rock star) with an almost equal empathy for those who repudiated popular culture for something presumably better.⁴⁸ In this respect, it is significant that Bobbie Ann Mason jokes about wanting to be a rock star; but it is equally significant that she persistently tried to publish in the New Yorker, rather than publishing in the smaller literary magazines in which beginning short story writers often find their first audience. To publish in the little magazines would constitute an act of wholehearted sympathy (which she clearly doesn't feel) with high culture literariness, just as the desire to be a rock star is an acknowledgment of the continuing pull of popular culture in her ambitions. Only the New Yorker—the short story writer's Mecca—could offer a reconciliation of these mixed desires, by giving Mason critical vogue with the upper class, enough readers to be considered popular, and the kind of middle-class respectability that can come only to the writer who is well paid for her efforts.

Mason's success, and her influence, also illustrate the degree to which modern trends in the short story have a historical precedent. The state of the contemporary American short story, with its populist orientation (“experiment is out, concern is in,” Elizabeth Spencer wrote in 1983)⁴⁹ and its academic institutions, represents a rebirth of the strong nationalist expectations and the emphasis on technique that have been its major tenets since the nineteenth century. A school of fiction such as “minimalism,” which promotes literary values such as economy and sparseness and encourages the individual writer to concentrate on each individual sentence, is certainly a logical development in an academic climate where there are currently two hundred graduate writing programs yearly conferring close to a thousand degrees on would-be short story writers—many of whom will become writing teachers and find that it is both easy and profitable to insist on teachable values such as economy of composition. This academic climate, however, was predated by the interest of the New Critics in the short story in the 1940s, which evolved from the explosion of short story handbooks and courses in the 1920s, which in turn was authorized by the immense influence of Brander Matthews's “Philosophy of the Short Story” (1885)—a treatise that, borrowing from Poe, insisted the short story was a superior art form precisely because it abided by the kind of rules that could be taught in school.⁵⁰

These pedagogical developments, in turn, would have been unlikely without the existence of a demand somewhere within the American political unconscious for an art form that acted like a mercantile object, and that somehow combined the best elements of being an aristocrat with being a good populist. It was this idyllic unification of classes that Poe promised American artists in “The Philosophy of Composition,” when he claimed that he would show how it was possible deliberately to compose a piece of writing that would “suit at once the popular and critical taste.”⁵¹ Bobbie Ann Mason is Poe turned inside out: Playing dumb where Poe played smart, shrinking her vocabulary and pointing her pen down the social ladder instead of up, she has nevertheless founded her project upon the same uneasy but radical rejection of the romance of the artist, and has weaved similarly slippery constructions of class and democracy into an ambitious, partially hoaxing, and easily imitable literary politics. Her work suggests that the distance between Poe's imperial pedagogical pose, and the deliberately self-deprecating and rustic Americana of one hundred years of local color, dialect, regionalism, and minimalism, is slim when measured in terms of class, writerly aspiration, or audience.

Notes

1. Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh,” New Yorker (20 Oct. 1980): 50–7. Mason's “Offerings” was published in the New Yorker earlier that year.

2. Best American Short Stories 1981, eds. Hortense Calisher and Shannon Ravenel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981) 171–84. Bobbie Ann Mason, “Residents and Transients: An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason,” Crazy Horse (Feb. 1984): 87. Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh, and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Row, 1982).

3. Mason, “Residents” 95. See, for instance, Nancy Pate, “The Real Small-Town South,” review of Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, by Lee Smith, Philadelphia Inquirer 12 Mar. 1990: 2–E. Kim Herzinger, “Introduction: On the New Fiction,” Mississippi Review 40/41 (Winter 1985): 8. Joe David Bellamy, “A Downpour of Literary Republicanism,” Mississippi Review 40/41 (Winter 1985): 31–9.

4. Mason, “Residents” 87.

5. See Chapter 2. For a discussion of the development of the short story of the 1830s, see Eugene Current-Garcia, The American Short Story before 1850: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1985) 91–9.

6. Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946) v–vi, 1–6.

7. Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (New York: World, 1963) 20, 40–1.

8. See Chapter 2. James Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950) 286. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), and F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1865–1905 (1938; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), both discuss magazine circulation rolls in detail.

   For a discussion of anthology selection processes, see Chapter 2. See also Peter S. Prescott, introduction, The Norton Book of American Short Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) 14. “I decided to resist the temptation to define to any strict degree what a short story is. To define is to exclude, and there's something in the American character that resists exclusion; for a collection of American stories I needed a vulgar comprehensiveness.”

9. Bobbie Ann Mason, “A Conversation with Bobbie Ann Mason,” ed. David Y. Todd, Boulevard 4–5.3–1 (Spring 1990): 135.

10. F. L. Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (1925; New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1975) 170.

11. Mason, “Residents” 95. In Bobbie Ann Mason, “An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason,” ed. Enid Shomer, Black Warrior Review 12.2 (1986): 98, she refers to the “alienated hero,” and the “superior sensibility.” In Mason, “Conversation” 134, she speaks of the “sensitive young man,” in the same context.

12. Mason, “Residents” 89, 90, 95, 96.

13. Suzanne Freeman, “Where the Old South Meets the New,” review of Shiloh, and Other Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason, Chicago Tribune Book World, 31 Oct. 1982: 3.

14. David Quammen, “Plain Folk and Puzzling Changes,” review of Shiloh, and Other Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason, New York Times Book Review, 21 Nov. 1982: 7. Freeman 8. Geoffrey Stokes, review of Shiloh, and Other Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason, Village Voice Literary Supplement, 9 Nov. 1982: 7.

15. Mason, “Residents” 90.

16. Mason, “Conversation” 135.

17. Mason, “Conversation” 135.

18. Mason, “Residents” 88.

19. Mason, “Residents” 102.

20. Quammen 7.

21. Mason, “Shiloh” 50.

22. Mason, “Shiloh” 57.

23. Mason, “Shiloh” 50.

24. Mason, “Shiloh” 57.

25. Mason, “Shiloh” 57.

26. Mason, Shomer “Interview” 96.

27. Mason, “Shiloh” 57.

28. Mason, “Residents” 101.

29. Mason, “Residents” 97.

30. Mason, “Conversation” 138–9.

31. Mason, “Residents” 101.

32. Mason, “Residents” 94.

33. Mason, “Residents” 95.

34. Mason, “Residents” 88.

35. Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds., American Short Stories (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown, 1990), for instance, includes Ursula LeGuin, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff, Tim O'Brien, David Michael Kaplan, Jayne Anne Phillips, Louise Erdrich, and Michael Martone in the “Contemporary Flowering” section. Ann Charters, ed., The Story and its Writer (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987) includes Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Alice Adams, Louise Erdrich, Mark Helprin, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leavitt, Ursula LeGuin, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Alice Walker. Michael Meyer, Bedford Introduction to Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987) uses Carver, Erdrich, Mason, Phillips, and Mark Strand for the “Album of Contemporary Stories.” Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell, eds., Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1991) includes Amy Tan, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Mason, Madison Smartt Bell, Lorrie Moore, Charles Baxter, and Louise Erdrich.

36. Mason, “Residents” 98.

37. Mason, “Conversation” 141.

38. Mason, “Residents” 104.

39. Mason, “Conversation” 134.

40. William Carlos Williams, “A Beginning on the Short Story” (Yonkers, NY: Alicat Press, 1950) 11. Raymond Carver, “Fires,” in Fires (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1983) 26.

41. For discussions of O'Brien, Farrell, Harte, et al., see Chapter 2. For bibliographical information, See Chapter 2, notes 10, 48, 52.

    An interesting distinction can be made between “insider” local colorists, and “outsider” local colorists. “Insiders” would include authors such as Charles Chesnutt, who wrote about black American characters for an Atlantic readership, or even Mark Twain, who began life as a Western mechanical worker. “Outsiders” would include any author who did not belong to the ethnic or geographic community that offered the “color” within that particular fiction. The implication, of course, is that the former group would be more “ideologically sensitive” in its depictions of local life, although the audience's perception of the ethnicity of the author would also create other less polite possibilities. It is unclear whether Mason would belong to the former group, or the latter group, which further complicates the “tension between being from there and not from there” that she describes as central to her fiction.

    Mason's own ethos of disposability also deserves further analysis. As an earlier part of this chapter suggests, Mason's conscious efforts to use potentially obsolescent popular culture references “date” her fictions, and create the possibility that they too will become obsolete. In addition, however, her use of those references also circumscribes her audience to individuals who are sufficiently highbrow to understand her postmodern formal gestures, and lowbrow enough to be familiar with Donahue and Bruce Springsteen. If Mason's individual fictions are disposable, her career is not: She simply recruits readers who follow popular culture at approximately the same distance as she does.

42. Mason, “Conversation” 143. The difference between the constraints of the short story and those in other genres is that the constraints placed on the short story writer are considered to discourage individual achievement, while the constraints in other genres are designed to display such achievements more clearly. Although a lyric poem such as a villanelle places enormous structural restrictions on the poet, for instance, poetry is nevertheless considered such a luxury good among literary forms that those restrictions become only hurdles over which an educated poet can display the sort of alienated, superior sensibility that has both the leisure time and the intelligence to triumph over voluntarily selected intellectual challenges.

43. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham's Magazine April 1846: 163–7. Reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984) 13–25, see especially 14–15. Poe, “Twice-Told Tales,” review of Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Graham's Magazine May 1842: 298–300. Reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews: 569–77.

44. See Chapter 2. Prescott 14: “The point I think is worth considering is that alone among literary forms, the short story is the one at whose creation Americans were present … to be sure, foreigners tried to invent the short story and may even have thought that they had … the thing itself is ours, invented by us a century and a half ago and dominated by Americans ever since.”

45. See Chapter 2. This canon persists, especially with the use of the short story as a teaching tool in contemporary creative writing workshops. John Knowles, in the introduction to New Generation: Fiction for Our Time from America's Writing Programs, ed. Alan Kaufman (New York: Anchor Press, 1987) writes that “it is unfortunate that the short story is the vehicle for the apprenticeship of these neophyte writers … and yet this difficult form, the short story, must be used in writing courses because in a relatively short period of time the students need to produce something which can be discussed, analysed, dissected” (xv–xvi).

46. See, for instance, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, eds., Understanding Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943). Susan Lohafer, introduction, Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, eds. Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), writes that the “litany of New Criticism … proved to be the charter of professional short story criticism. … More accessible than poetry, more manageable than novels, it was just the right size for a demonstration” (4–5).

47. Walter Pitkin, How to Write Short Stories (New York: 1923) 46.

48. Mason, “Residents” 103.

49. Elizabeth Spencer, “Experiment is Out, Concern is In,” review of Best American Short Stories 1982, eds. John Gardner and Shannon Ravenel, New York Times Book Review, 21 Nov. 1982: 7.

50. Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short Story (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1901; New York: Peter Smith, 1931). Charles E. May, “The Unique Effect of the Short Story,” Studies in Short Fiction 13 (Summer 1976): 289.

51. Poe, “Philosophy” 15.