[In the following excerpt, Sachs considers the crystallization of the modern short story in French literature around 1830.]

As a literary art form, the short story emerged even later among the Western literatures than did its late-blooming next-to-kin, the novel. We generally think of the modern novel as an eighteenth-century development, mainly in France and England. But the modern short story did not crystallize into a recognizable genre until a full century later, with the work of Nodier, Mérimée, and the first generation of Romantics in France, and with the work of Hawthorne and Poe in the United States.

This late emergence of the short story form is a rather startling fact of literary history, when one stops to think about it. For storytelling is, after all, a very ancient art. Narrative has always been a staple element in every form of literary expression, both oral and written.¹ It seems incredible, therefore, that it took so many centuries of trial and error to hit upon the literary form in which man's storytelling propensity could become artistically viable. Yet trial and error is what the history of brief narrative amounts to, before the emergence of the modern short story. The case of France is entirely typical.

The earliest analogues of the short story in French literature are probably the exempla and contes dévots which were part of medieval religious literature. Courtly literature produced its lais, and bourgeois literature its fabliaux, in the medieval period as well. Whatever their other virtues, these medieval types of story displayed the most primitive kind of plotting and characterization, and proved unable to survive the medieval era as a literary form. The late Middle Ages and Renaissance experienced a vogue of imitations of Boccaccio's Decameron, called nouvelles, which at their best did mark some advance in narrative sophistication. They were still too crude in form and style to attain the level of art, and like the mediéval story forms, they failed to survive their era.²

During the baroque and classical periods, the brief narrative form proved unattractive except to the unique genius of La Fontaine, some of whose poems are skillful narratives, though still far in concept from the modern short story. The end of the seventeenth century witnessed the vogue of the fairy tale, charming but too limited by nature to be developed artistically. By the early eighteenth century, the conte de fées had given way to more exotic tastes, such as the conte oriental and the conte licencieux, forms which gradually were adapted by the following generation to the purposes of social and political pamphleteering. It is quite true that the genius of Voltaire raised this pamphleteering, at times, to the level of art in a form he called conte philosophique—but there was only one Voltaire. His equally remarkable contemporary, Diderot, contributed the most advanced ideas of his day about the theory of fiction.³ But theory failed to inspire practice, even in the case of Diderot's own stories, which were too loosely constructed and too lacking in dramatic intensity to provide an imitable model or to launch a genre. If the eighteenth century saw a notable increase in activity in the domain of brief narrative, compared to previous eras, it nevertheless failed to achieve a concept of form, for such narratives, that had adequate artistic potential.

Post-revolutionary France, a time of confusion and trial in the arts, seemed bent on experimenting with all the existing literary types, including brief narrative, in the search for modes of expression appropriate to a troubled age. Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Constant, and Nodier all worked with short fiction, among other forms, during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. But the artistic potential in the form remained unrealized, and interest in it continued to be sporadic until the end of the third decade. It was about 1830 that the short story seemed suddenly to come into its own. A very dramatic increase in the number of stories written and published, both in periodicals and in book form, revolutionized the literary world in a matter of just a few years. The most gifted writers now seriously turned to the form, assuring quality that was both high and sustained. The prestige of the form grew accordingly, together with an increased consciousness of the structural requirements and expressive possibilities inherent in this type of writing. Within a decade, the variety and excellence of the work accomplished in this form, and the high public receptivity accorded it, compelled recognition that a new genre existed, distinct from the novel and with principles and standards of its own.⁴ Since that time, and right down to the present, the short story has enjoyed a vigorous life, not only in France and the United States where it began, but in all the Western literatures. It has been able to command the best talents in each generation, and win a wide public, while displaying remarkable powers of growth and development, flexibility and self-renewal. Today, the artistic validity of the short story as a literary genre is securely established.

There are some persuasive reasons one can adduce to explain—partially at least—the bewildering suddenness with which the short story burst forth into a full-blown genre around 1830 in France. It was, to begin with, undoubtedly a phenomenon of the new industrial age. Advances in the technology of printing, and the invention of advertising as a source of income, combined to make inexpensive daily newspapers a common reality in the 1820's, and provided for the first time a hospitable medium for the short story. Before that time, newspapers and periodicals were few, and those that existed were so costly that their audience was restricted. Until the development of mass circulation newspapers, it was a very difficult matter to get a single short story published, and prior to the eighteenth century it was virtually impossible, as is evidenced by the fact that brief narratives have seldom come down to us singly from those early periods, but almost exclusively in the form of books of collected tales. The mass circulation newspapers afforded the first ready market for the single story, which proved a powerful new incentive to authors to devote their talent and energy to this kind of writing. It became amply clear, around 1830, that the gifts of the story-teller were to an unprecedented degree in demand and profitable: first, because periodical publication was not only easy but remunerative; second, because the same stories could then be collected into a book, doubling the possible return from each piece of writing; and third, because the vogue of the keepsake (decorative little volumes of stories which were popular as gifts or mementoes for young ladies) added further to the earning potential of any successful story. In sum, the market for the short narrative, once risky and exiguous, had suddenly blossomed into one of the richest available to the professional writer.⁵

Novels were, of course, even more in demand than short stories in that era, and for much the same kind of reasons. Newspaper editors soon saw, for example, that a successful novel appearing in installments in their journal created reader loyalty. Moreover, serial publication was excellent advance publicity for a book, as authors soon realized. Novels and short stories thus both experienced a major boom in popularity and distribution with the advent of mass circulation newspapers. But the reasons for the boom were not solely economic and technological. The development of these newspapers, and the contents their editors favored, represented a calculated response to a new and growing demand. For by the 1820's, thanks to the spread of education, the literate public was far vaster than it had ever been before, and this public was numerically dominated by the urban middle class. This dominant element naturally became the new locus of taste formation in all aspects of culture, including literature. By its very nature, the urban middle class tended to reject old aristocratic tastes. Living in the world of rapid change, shifting values, and growing complexities fostered by the industrial revolution and the expansion of cities, this new class of readers preferred the immediacy of prose for its medium, and wanted above all to read about itself, either to help find some coherence in a newly bewildering world, or perhaps, upon occasion, to bask in the image of its own virtues for reassurance. Realistic prose fiction seemed to offer the most successful response to the needs of these new readers. Novels comfortingly organized and interpreted the new urban experience they were undergoing, while the short story cast light for them into individual dark corners of existence.⁶ Thus prose fiction came to displace poetry and drama as the form of literary expression most favored by the public.

The short story in particular had special virtues for this audience. For one thing it offered both brevity and integrity, a combination of enormous appeal: to be able to obtain a story which was satisfyingly complete in itself, cheaply bought, and easily read at one sitting in the privacy of one's home, afforded a new pleasure to masses of city dwellers.⁷ Moreover, the short story proved to possess, because of its very nature, the power to generate the most intense kind of emotion and to compress within very small compass a provocative range of meanings and effects. This intensity and concentration, inherent in the form, afforded the aesthetic pleasures of both poetry and drama in the one conveniently accessible medium. The short story, then, seemed suited not only to the new economic reality of the cheap daily newspaper, but also to the new social reality of a mass urban audience in urgent need of satisfaction for its longings and frustrations. As a literary concept, the short story was, for the France of 1830, an idea whose time had finally come.

The social and economic forces which were at work to propel the short story to prominence obviously existed elsewhere than just in France at that period. Since those forces did not always engender an outpouring of short stories—in England, for one example—one must recognize that those forces could not by themselves have been decisive in France. Perhaps, indeed, it will never be possible to offer more than a partial explanation of such a puzzling phenomenon as the abrupt crystallization, after many failures, of a new and successful literary genre. However, it is important to recognize at least one other element, that of pure chance, in this French phenomenon: had there not happened to exist in France writers of the imaginative gifts of Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier, and Charles Nodier just at the moment when all the external circumstances were right for the flowering of brief narrative, the French would certainly not have had the honor and distinction of establishing the short story as a genre within Western literature.

Whatever the causes, the historical evidence is incontrovertible that a new literary genre crystallized in France about the year 1830. This fact gives to the decades after 1830 a crucial importance in the history of the French short story. These were decades of exploration and discovery, so far as the capabilities and limits of the form were concerned. The essential discovery, basic to all others, was that the short story required a strict unity of focus. It became apparent that all the elements of any narrative—plot, characters, structure, style—must be held together by and made to contribute to one central, easily stated aim in order to produce a true short story. This requirement differentiated the short story, in a definable way, from the more diffuse and complex form of the novel, and afforded a clear opportunity for the exercise of art. It was thus a discovery which could make an aesthetic object of any otherwise ordinary tale, and which contained the seeds of a poetics for the genre. One can see the discovery dramatically revealed in Prosper Mérimée's celebrated story “Matéo Falcone,” in which every sentence and every detail is carefully designed to explain and prepare for the climatic scene of the son's summary execution by his father. It was the relentless structural organization of the material which was the secret of that story's impact, demonstrating the dimensions which an artistic form could add to the raw material of a single occurrence. Indeed, because “Matéo Falcone” was so startlingly superior to all that preceded it, and was Mérimée's first story, published in the spring of 1829, there is a temptation to see in it the prime source and inspiration for the whole outpouring of short stories that began immediately after.⁸ It is hardly plausible, of course, that one story could have had so much historical effect, and there are, in any case, enough stories of some quality published before 1829 to suggest that the momentum built up more gradually. But “Matéo Falcone” was undoubtedly a landmark and a revelation, both for Mérimée himself and for others, inspiring by its stunning example assiduous efforts to reproduce the same success by making use of the aesthetic secrets it employed.

The requirement of unity of focus, at first blush severely limiting, was to prove liberating (as rules of artistic form usually do) in the course of the energetic explorations of the form by nineteenth-century short story writers. In such a story as the famous “Carmen,” for example, Mérimée himself was to show that an action-filled plot, with many twists and turns, need not be inconsistent with the requirement of unity of focus. Nor was it necessary to confine the scope of a short story in time. In Maupassant's two most widely known stories, “La Parure” and “La Ficelle,” the meaning and pattern of a whole life is revealed, and Anatole France, in his brilliant masterpiece “Le Procurateur de Judée,” found a way to illuminate nearly two thousand years of Western history in a single short story. Even the belief that focal unity could support but one or two central characters in a story was shattered by Maupassant's fine depiction of a veritable social microcosm in “Boule de Suif.” As for the need to confine the action to but one milieu, Flaubert's constantly changing settings in “La Légende de Saint Julien L'Hospitalier” firmly disposed of that notion, for the unity of focus is in no way impaired in that remarkable composition.

There seemed, indeed, to be no end to the variety and flexibility which were possible in the form. During the years of development in the nineteenth century, as this collection aims to demonstrate, French writers displayed remarkable ingenuity and inventiveness in a genre which, superficially at least, has to be defined in terms of rigid limitations, because its soul is brevity. Even the matter of length was probed and found remarkably elastic, there being successful stories of but two or three pages, and others approaching the size of a short novel without losing the identifying characteristics of the genre. Although it seemed especially well adapted to the depiction of reality, the short story was found to be an effective instrument for portraying the supernatural or the marvelous. Prose seemed its very essence, but the form was found to be adaptable to the expression of poetic visions or mystical experiences as well. If the form seemed at its best in the presentation of dramatic, intense and complete actions, writers nevertheless attained excellence with the leisurely vignette, the open-ended slice of life, and the character portrait, all within the short story form. Storytelling was, of course, the bedrock on which the genre was founded, and the form proved hospitable to all the known tricks and techniques of that trade, including the varieties of first-person narration, the manipulation of point of view, the control of pace and tone, and the creation of atmosphere. Even the art of purposeful digression, so natural to the novel, could be successfully integrated into the short story in spite of its brevity. No kind of subject proved intractable to the form, whether it was pure fantasy or the starkest realism, historical drama or personal vicissitude, social comedy or heroic tragedy. Any conceivable type of character, any mood and any literary style could be accommodated in the form. …

Given the sustained vigor, the technical variety, and the imagination with which the short story form was developed in France between 1830 and 1900, and the eminence of the names contributing to that development, the genre must be counted a success and accorded a significant place in literary history. Yet it is true that no such recognition has yet been given it. Attempts to trace the history of the genre are few, recent, and necessarily still inadequate, and no general history of French literature has yet given the short story any special place of its own as an entity or an influence. The consensus, unspoken but effective, continues to be that in French literature the short story is a minor genre. Even the writers themselves sometimes convey such an attitude. Balzac clearly preferred the novel; Stendhal and Gautier frankly exploited the short story for money; Flaubert, Zola, and Daudet considered it a young man's training exercise for bigger things, or a way of relaxing between major novels. The greatest practitioner of them all, Maupassant, never ceased trying to write a great novel, as though he feared the short story were an inadequate basis for enduring literary fame. However much the prestige of the genre rose with its achievements and its popularity in the nineteenth century, it never, even in the eyes of its creators, attained major status. Nor is there reason to believe matters are different in our own day, at least in France. The short story remains a vital, active medium in the twentieth century, but a writer's short stories still tend to be numbered among his lesser works, and there has not as yet appeared any writer of top rank content to be recognized as a great short story writer and no more.

It is doubtless partly a reflection of the short story's status as a minor genre that the French continue to have no name for the genre which is universally accepted. There are two words which are very widely used, conte and nouvelle, but they are of about equal frequency, neither one showing signs of giving way to the other in popular usage.⁹ The French language also possesses such words as histoire, historiette, récit, and anecdote, any of which can be found applied to compositions we should unhesitatingly call short stories in English. No doubt this array of words preserves some significant nuances. Certainly conte and nouvelle, though frequently used as though they were interchangeable, do still connote special nuances to the educated, which tends to promote their continued coexistence. Conte, for example, has a strong flavor of the unreal or the supernatural, which harks back at least to the seventeenth-century usage in conte de fées. By the same token, the word nouvelle is sometimes confined because of etymology to narratives which have the character of real events (or “news”), and is felt to be inapplicable to stories of the fantastic or the improbable. It is also true of conte that it is generally used only of quite brief narratives. The longer the story, the less likely a Frenchman is to think of calling it a conte, and the more likely he is to prefer nouvelle or récit. Nevertheless, however useful the distinctions these various words make possible, the continued lack of agreement on a single word in the French language to designate the short story is a striking linguistic symbol of the French failure to grant the full recognition to the genre which its achievements merit.

Notes

1. For an excellent treatment of the role of narrative in all literature, see The Nature of Narrative by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (Oxford University Press, 1966), especially chapters 1-3.

2. The best discussion of the art of the early nouvelle is by Janet M. Ferrier, entitled Forerunners of the Novel. An Essay on the Development of the Nouvelle in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 1954).

3. Still a good treatment of Diderot's fiction theories, and of Marmontel's as well, is the pioneering article of Horatio Smith, “The Development of Brief Narrative in Modern French Literature: A Statement of the Problem” in PMLA, XXXII (1917), 582-97.

4. For a careful account of the crystallization and recognition of the short story genre in France, together with an interesting attempt to define its principles and standards, see Alfred G. Engstrom, “The Formal Short Story in France and Its Development before 1850,” in the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) publication Studies in Philology, XLII, 3 (1945), 627-39.

5. Albert J. George gives a good account of the growth of mass journalism and its impact on short story writing in chapter III of his Short Fiction in France, 1800-1850 (Syracuse University Press, 1964), pp. 53-64.

6. The complex relationship between the rise of the middle class and the rise of prose fiction has been most thoroughly explored and illuminated in Harry Levin's The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (Oxford University Press, 1963).

7. The psychological appeal of the completeness of a short story must have been especially strong for such readers. As Professor Frank Kermode has argued, in his fascinating study The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1967), fictions are one of man's devices for assuaging his anguish in the face of infinite time. Conscious of living in a world whose beginning and end he cannot ever know, man needs to invent fictions, that is, structured narratives having a beginning, a middle, and an end, in order to impose coherence and meaning on the otherwise shapeless flow of existence. “We project ourselves … past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle,” says Kermode (p. 8). If this psychological need for wholeness be indeed one of the roots of our storytelling propensity, the bourgeois public of 1830 in France was a most natural audience for the immediate gratification the short story form could offer.

8. Both Alfred Engstrom and Robert Lewis, in their unpublished dissertations on the development of the French short story, inclined to argue that the birth of the short story as a genre in France dated quite precisely from the publication of Mérimée's Matéo Falcone in May of 1829.

9. The failure of the French language to recognize the genre is compounded by its further failure to recognize the author. See the article by R. Godenne, “Comment appeler un auteur de nouvelles?” in Romantic Review, LVIII, 1 (February 1967), 38-43.