SOURCE: "Plain and/or Fancy: Where the Short Story Is and May Be Going," in The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story, edited by Wendell M. Aycock, Texas Tech Press, 1982, pp. 133-41.

[In the following essay, Garrett comments on the short story, examining the history of the genre and predicting its future.]

In his Harvard commencement speech of 1978, a speech which outraged a good many prominent people, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a pertinent remark concerning what he had noticed about intellectual life in the United States:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those which are not fashionable and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or to be heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence as in the East; however a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevent the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and give rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.

["A World Split Apart," Vital Speeches, September 1, 1978, p. 681]

Solzhenitsyn's remark provides a good point of departure. But we can begin to describe the present only if we can define its characteristic differences from the past. Our culture concentrates a great deal of energy and attention on just this effort: getting to know the past, especially the recent past. This task would seem to be easy because so many texts and images and artifacts remain. There are even people to talk to who were there and are here, people who should have viable perspectives worth sharing.

Yet recent history, including literary history, is marred not only by faulty, slovenly understanding and interpretation, but also by an excess of factual inaccuracy and crude distortion. We, writers and society at large, permit liberties and license in dealing with the recent past which we would never tolerate in any study directed toward the middle ages, Classical Rome or ancient Greece. The closer we get to our own time, the greater the distortion. For instance, nothing in film, documentary or specialized, comes even close to expressing the basic truths of the Vietnam War. Ironically, the only way to reassemble the truth is by and through the poetry and fiction about the war which has been published or is coming along. But this assembling must be done with the understanding that most critics and reviewers are unaware even of what has already been published on the subject, including some superb short stories. Still worse, those critics who are aware deliberately ignore all but the few bits and pieces which confirm their preconceived opinions. Published material is even more highly selective and more distorted. Beyond considerations of quality—quite aside from any considerations of quality—the materials published on that extremely controversial time must necessarily conform closely to somebody's preconceptions of the events and their meaning in order to find a way into print. Unfortunately Solzhenitsyn is right. The contemporary critical mindset favors novelty. Since the so-called new slant must somehow conform to the basic theoretical clichés and the historical consensus, novelty becomes, purely and simply, a matter of style.

The recent past can be rearranged to fit any theory. Precisely because there are so many facts, images, texts, and artifacts available and since an act of selection must be made (which one is important or worthy of attention and which one is not), it is quite easy not merely to select, but to preserve those aspects of the past that one wishes to preserve and, in effect, to nominate for oblivion all that one does not approve of. Even print technology conspires against us. The warehousing and storage of books is already a problem. But so is paper. The life of a contemporary commercially published book is estimated at only fifty years. Already a great many books are disintegrating. All will follow after. Some will be saved, copied and stored by other means. What a fine way to dispose of what is irrelevant, what is out of fashion. I am told that the Soviets are literally and continually changing the pages of their encyclopedias and newspapers to make them fit present policy. Our way may prove just as effective. Paradoxically, this acid-ridden, biodegradable, rapidly disintegrating paper is still so valuable that it has shortened the life of many books that are not enormously and immediately successful. Many books that were once remaindered are now pulped for the sake of that valuable paper. Ironically those texts which may have the best chance of surviving are those on fancy broadsides and especially those in typescript or longhand, done on the highest quality paper.

Oral history may become increasingly influential as literacy declines. But too often the authenticity and authority of the speaking voice overrides our considerations of its accuracy and honesty. The clichés of the evening news are made authentic, given legitimacy by the newscaster's persona (even as the clichés of modern fiction are given substance by their inclusion in a significant anthology). And tape recordings are, like film and video tape, easy to manipulate, by erasure, by editing and rearrangement. This kind of editing is already commonplace and accepted in broadcast news (both radio and TV) and in documentary film. There is no reason to imagine that even honorable custodians of oral history will not edit it to advantage.

I will illustrate my next point with a brief quotation from the "Prologue" to [Sara Davidson's 1977 book] Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties:

In that time, that decade which belonged to the young, we had thought life was free and would never run out. There were good people and bad people and we could tell them apart by a look or by words spoken in code. We were certain we belonged to a generation that was special. We did not need or care about history because we had sprung from nowhere. We said what we thought and demanded what was right and there was no opposition.

"We did not need or care about history because we had sprung from nowhere." This deliberately cultivated ignorance of the past cannot be overlooked for its import to our survey of the past.

Now, where, in terms of my chosen topic, do these observations about the past and present take us? What is the state of the contemporary short story? We may begin by pointing out some positive signs.

Like the old-fashioned postman who was not stayed from the swift completion of his appointed round, the writer of stories does not seem deterred or dismayed by the climate of the times and his knowledge or ignorance of it. The stories keep coming. And, in my opinion, many, many of them are very fine.

As the number of national places for short stories has dwindled and diminished, the importance of the quarterlies and little magazines has grown; and the number of little magazines, coming and going quickly as always, has greatly expanded. Although there are not nearly enough places in which the writer of short fiction may show and tell, there are a great many. The extremely limited national showcase for stories has resulted in a near (if not perfect) equality among little magazines. One can find excellent, exciting work in even the most humble and obscure of them. And on the next level of book publication of story collections, even though the commercial publishers have backed away from more than minimal support, there are a growing number of university presses and small presses publishing short fiction. Some of these, both magazines and small presses, have gained government support for their activities. There are also prizes and contests and so forth (like the AWP contest Gordon Weaver ably managed) to encourage both writers and publishers.

It is true that many of the older, more mature and experienced fiction writers, who certainly could be writing short stories, do not do so much (except in the forms of excerpts from novels in progress). They refrain from writing short stories mainly because, as "professionals," not many of them can afford the time. So, except for a few prominent regulars, there is a loss of contribution from the mature professionals. (Such is not the case in poetry where we have some very fine poets, still working, who have passed into old age.)

But coming out of the proliferating creative writing courses and programs at both graduate and undergraduate levels are many very gifted and often very well-trained beginning writers. They are mostly young, but not always. And the story writer of today has, at his disposal, a wealth and variety of examples, models, barely imagined by the earlier generations. There is not merely the assimilation of the stories of the past, but also the stories, past and present, of the whole world, coming in translation. Ideally these models should extend the range of narrative possibilities for the writer and encourage a more open and varied fiction than we have yet known in America. Since the publication of stories is not directly profitable for most writers, there seems a certain purity of purpose and quality, which used to be reserved for lyric poets.

Thus far the present situation looks fairly positive. All this energy, all this activity must surely come to something. As optimistic Americans we have to believe that there will be, as if by Newtonian physics, some commensurate reaction. Surely in spite of difficulties, the future for short fiction looks good, if not exactly rosy.

Or does it? Is even the present as vital as I have described it? Let me work backward through the same positive points I made.

Purity of Purpose

The pressures on the writer to get work published, especially if the writer is a teacher, are enormous. The jostling competition for place and space is just as rough and ready as it would be if large, direct rewards were involved. Because of the pressures and the sense of competition, the opportunities for dishonesty and corruption are frequent and, in my best judgment, more and more frequently seized on and rationalized.

Richness and Variety of Models and the Influence of Available Translations

It is my experience that the young and beginning American writers do not even begin to take advantage of all the available examples they could learn and profit from. The majority are poorly read, except for anthologies and for the work of a very few, very well-known and highly-regarded writers. In other words, they approach literature in more or less the way they approach popular culture (records, for example), depending on the star system. They have neither the time nor the inclination for discovery of their own. They are a perfect audience, then, for the literary status quo, being committed to the maintaining of it, in the hope that, somehow, some room may yet be found for them.

Despite all the unquestionable richness and variety of models at their fingertips, the beginning writers, out of almost invincible ignorance on the one hand and an urgent desire for recognition and reward on the other, have reduced their narrative choices, their "options," to a bare minimum, thus becoming, from the outset of their writing careers, profoundly conservative. Even a great deal of the so-called experimental fiction is more derivative and less adventurous than it ought to be.

Little more may be said for the influence of translation. We have some wonderful translators among us, and they deserve recognition. But a great many of our poets and story writers who imagine that they are influenced by foreign literature in translation have less than a whiff of the original language to fuel them. And they are generally ignorant of the culture from which the literature grew.

Furthermore, the competition and pressure for recognition mitigates against either much variety or adventure. If the young writer wants to be recognized, he has to be published. To be published, the work must seem to possess recognizable qualities to one or more editors, who have limited time and energy and are overwhelmed with manuscripts. Once again we must return to Solzhenitsyn's observation. Recognizable quality is, then, by definition, something they have seen before. Once recognized, and in order to maintain this visibility, the artist, whether he is John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Donald Barthelme or a brand new writer, is strongly encouraged to imitate his own style.

Having made these observations about recognition, I must suggest a paradox. Editors naturally get bored with this situation in which everyone's turf and boundaries are as tamely well-defined as the plots of land in some suburban development. It is easy to feel jaded, to imagine that they have seen it all. So there is, in fact, some modest effort, within the already stated and very limited terms, to "discover" new and different talent. (The results are usually no better than "new improved Blue Cheer with lemon borax," that kind of thing.) What is discovered—whether it is good or bad in itself is irrelevant—is recognizable in technique and acceptable in content, but different from the conventional in some conventionally superficial way—like tone of voice.

I have just mentioned content. I don't want to waste a lot of time on the subject (and anyway Solzhenitsyn said it all), but it should be understood that the substance as well as the style is involved in the editorial and critical recognition of quality. The very process we have developed in the publishing business would lead, even in ideal circumstances, to an ideological conformity bordering on totalitarian rigidity. Most of what filters through in fiction, non-fiction and poetry merely serves to confirm the intellectual consensus, that is fashion. Contemporary literature has to be fashionable (recognizably so) in content as well as form. Therefore, most contemporary American fiction, short or long, and poetry, is forced to handle ideas on about the level of flashcards and feelings with the same depth as Top Forty Tunes. Instead of dancing to any tune in the world, most American writers are content to caper in the leg irons and handcuffs of fashion.

One final note about recognizable qualities. Since recognition is a crucial factor, it follows that the recognition of the writer himself, as personality, as celebrity, can be the essential difference between one writer and another, between success and failure. The color and charisma of personality and appearance become as important as the literary work itself. This is not surprising, but what is, is that the whole sense of literary and historical context in which "major" figures grow and thrive is lost. Ironically, one can be surprised to rediscover the truth. Novelist and poet Fred Chappell, in a recent newspaper commentary about a new anthology, Contemporary Southern Poetry, notices something we all tend to forget or ignore:

A curious thing is that in this anthology the big guns make no grander bangs than the smaller ones. Here James Dickey does not appear as a giant among pygmies. . . . Crowded in with his peers, Dickey is simply an equal among equals, and one begins to realize how much his personal flamboyance has contributed to his national acclaim.

Creative Writing

I have professionally and consistently supported the teaching of creative writing. But there are a couple of problems worth mentioning. First, so many of the graduates of creative writing programs, especially the larger ones, go directly into the teaching of creative writing themselves. This fact is neither good nor bad, as such, but certainly has the dangerous potential of enforcing an academic climate and reinforcing the status quo, creating a kind of beaux arts school of fiction and poetry. Another problem derives from the competition among schools and programs for status, for their own kind of recognition. This competition can and does lead to variations on the old-school-tie syndrome, which can and does manifest itself editorially and critically, adding one more inducement to intellectual dishonesty.

The Old Pros

All of these conditions serve to make the withdrawal of so many mature fiction writers from the short story form all the more serious in its consequences. They alone seem to be in a position to take really adventurous directions, to exercise free choices, and to set examples that might be helpful for the apprentice and journeymen writers. It is good to have John Cheever and Eudora Welty (and now again Truman Capote) writing short fiction. But what a pleasure and a consolation it would be to have more stories by the likes of Wright Morris, Robert Penn Warren and Shelby Foote. Something of the formidable rigor of the system we live under may be inferred from the fact that we seldom get new short fiction from our old masters.

Growth and Proliferation of Small Presses and Little Magazines

It is hard to find fault with this phenomenon. And yet, we do have a history, and we can make comparisons. When Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Hemingway and all the others were publishing their stories, they dealt by and large with well-funded profit-making institutions—Liberty, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, the old Esquire. Today, among the mass magazines that publish fiction, only The New Yorker and Playboy have the kind of financial base to claim that kind of independence. But it is worth remembering that The New Yorker was alive and kicking then, too, and didn't publish Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis.

Anyway, the chief quarterlies and the university presses are dependent on the institutions that support them. The little magazines and small presses are, of course, non-profit enterprises. That is more a description of reality than a legal category. None of them will ever make a profit. Most will seldom, if ever, break even on individual works. Thus they are, one and all, dependent upon the whimsical circumstances of private charity or, increasingly, on government support. Thus, 'we have the whole knotty problem of the relationship, in this country and at this time, of our government to the arts. Whatever stand one takes, whatever position or party one cleaves to, he will have to admit that there are real dangers involved in government support of the arts.

Finally, little magazines and small presses are run by amateurs and dilettantes, who publish much more poetry than short fiction, and more short short fiction than long short fiction. If one dabbles editorially in the arts, he can publish many more poets than story writers.

Well, there's the present, as I see it. Is there any cause for optimism? What are the future prospects? For one thing, the sheer number of writers of short fiction delights me, if only because statistically a certain number, however small, are bound to produce adventurous and interesting work, often in spite of themselves and certainly despite the system.

There is finally the matter of history. Ignoring history, the high priests and celebrants of the literary establishment have sought to manipulate the present and to control the future. History proves, not rarely but invariably, that the latter is impossible and that the former (manipulation of present reality to suit one's interests and preconceptions) can indeed be accomplished and often successfully enough to be satisfactory (as in our own era). But there is one absolute truth—the present becomes the past. As soon as that happens, a new establishment is created. History proves that every new establishment, even if it is wholly hereditary, will leave the dead to bury the dead, will promptly ignore the immediate past, or will seek to review and rewrite it. If the former, then it all came to nothing anyway. What is ignored cannot be celebrated. If the latter, then writers of history will be called in. And one of the things that historians uniformly despise is the discovery that others have tried to do their work for them in advance.

Perhaps it will be the honor and pleasure of some future story teller to remind them of the undeniable truth, out of our deepest past, of the only future we and they, one and all, can be certain of. Here is how David, the King and Psalmist, chose to say it (in the 49th Psalm):

Though they thought well of themselves while they lived, and were praised for their success,
They shall join the company of their forbears, who will never see the light again.
Those who are honored, but have no understanding, are like the beasts that perish.