The Short Story: An Underrated Art
[In this excerpt, Gullason uses "Gooseberries" to illuminate the highly flexible qualities of the short story form, and to "counteract the usual [aesthetic] charges leveled against the short story."]
What must we do so that the short story can receive the kind of consideration it deserves? We can try to rid the genre of the prejudices that have conspired against it. We can come to it as though it were a fresh discovery. We can settle on one term for the medium, like "short fiction" or "short story." References to names like "anecdote," "tale," "narrative," "sketch," though convenient, merely add to the confusion and suggest indecision and a possible inferiority complex. Too many names attached to the short story have made it seem almost nameless. Even the provincial attitude of teachers and anthologists has not helped. Most often students are fed on a strict diet of British and American short-story writers. But the short story is not solely a British and American product; it is an international art form, and Continental as well as Oriental, and other authors should be more fully represented in any educational program. As Maurice Beebe reminds us [in Approaches to the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature, 1961], "Once translated, Zola, Mann, Proust, Kafka become authors in English and American literature. . . ." Once this philosophy is accepted, the short story will automatically increase in vitality and stature.
One way the reader can contribute to a fuller appreciation of an old art is by simply applying the negative criticisms already mentioned—oneness of effect, formulas, and so on—to examples of the modern short story. For an illustration of the older modern story of average length (5000 words), one can go to Chekhov's popular "Gooseberries," written in 1898. Too many readers would probably be so frustrated and so bored by all the talk and the lack of action in this story that they would stop before they really started. A more patient reader would go on trying to understand and appreciate Chekhov's tone before attempting any kind of critical evaluation. For Chekhov tells a story so casually, almost so indifferently, that he himself seems bored. Now on the surface level a Hemingway story, like "The Killers," moves very rapidly; and we in America are used to quickness. Chekhov insists on putting us into a rocking chair.
On a first study, "Gooseberries" seems to be about Nikolay and the realization of his dreams: of a man once lost as a clerk, who has now found his meaning and validity as a human being, and consequently his freedom. But as Ivan tells the story about his brother Nikolay to Burkin and Alyokhin, the story becomes a study in Nicolay's self-deception and hypocrisy. For as Nikolay achieves what Tolstoy said was all that man needed—six feet of earth—Ivan sees the blindness of both Nikolay and Tolstoy. He says:
. . . six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. . . . To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm—that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
But then the story is also a study of Nikolay as a dead soul, the superfluous man. This is corroborated in many ways. The imagery of fatness clearly reveals Nikolay's dead life; Ivan says:
I made my way to the house and was met by a fat dog with reddish hair that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barelegged woman, who also looked like a pig, came out of the kitchen and said that the master was resting after dinner. I went in to see my brother, and found him sitting up in bed, with a quilt over his knees. He had grown older, stouter, flabby; his cheeks, his nose, his lips jutted out: it looked as though he might grunt into the quilt at any moment.
And yet, though Nikolay is living a life of self-deception and hypocrisy, and though he is a dead soul, he is enjoying every moment of it: to him, his gooseberries are delicious; to his brother Ivan, the realist, they are hard and sour. To Nikolay his illusions are not illusions—they are happy realities. This is only one layer of the several paradoxes relating to illusions and realities in the story.
The story, then, is far too elaborate to be limited merely to Nikolay and his gooseberries. The gooseberries become a focal and radiating symbol, for they also touch the lives of Burkin, Ivan, and Alyokhin specifically, and Russia generally. This story ever expands in meaning and meanings.
For before Ivan tells his story in Alyokhin's house we are told: "It was a large structure of two stories. . . ." Structurally this is a frame story, a story within a story, and gradually the life of Nikolay becomes a first stage in studying a general condition in Russian life. As Ivan tells his brother's story he also tells his own, and reveals, through his constant rationalization, that he too is a dead soul, the superfluous man. He shows the pathos of his whole life, for now an old man, he cries out: "If I were young!" And he has his own deceptions and his own illusions. As he sees Nikolay's failures and his own, he looks to Alyokhin—as a "young" man of forty—to carry the banner of freedom and his idealizations of life. But he can't see—neither can Alyokhin—that Alyokhin is paralleled to Nikolay: both are landowners, one is lost in the work of his farm, the other in his gooseberries. Alyokhin can never realize the ideals mouthed by Ivan; the omniscient author, Chekhov, reflects ironically: "The guests were not talking about groats, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his [Alyokhin's] life, and he was glad of it and wanted them to go on."
Earlier, Ivan has generalized on Russian life, and, without knowing it, the life of the story. He says:
Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying—Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. . . . It is a general hypnosis.
The paralysis of the individual lives and this general hypnosis are sounded in the opening of the story. The atmosphere—the "still" day, "tedious," "gray" and "dull," and later "it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries"—infects everything. By the skillful use of contrast—the "refreshing" rain, the brief entrances and exits of the beautiful and pleasant maid Pelageya, and the ladies and generals in the golden picture frames—Chekhov further ironically studies what becomes the "general hypnosis theme" in Russia. From the choric Burkin at the story's end, we hear that he "could not sleep for a long time, [and he] kept wondering where the unpleasant odor came from." The unpleasant odor refers to the burnt tobacco from Ivan's pipe; this unpleasantness becomes, in a sense, the man with the hammer, mentioned earlier in the story, who is knocking at the reader's mind about happy and unhappy man. The monotony of the day—the rain at the beginning and at the end—and the tediousness of the tale transfers to the reader the paralysis of lives and the hypnosis theme.
The story does not end. Nothing is solved. But the story is like a delayed fuse; it depends on after effects on the reader via the poetic technique of suggestion and implication. We have enough of the parts to complete a significant pattern. This particular, isolated action moves to a more general plane of significance.
We can use "Gooseberries" to counteract the usual charges leveled against the short story. First, let us counteract Poe's legacy of oneness of effect. This story has layer and layer of meanings and plenty of contradictions in these meanings. If there were Poe's oneness here, the reader would not be forced to reread the story. Then we counteract the issue of mechanical formulas. This story seems as artless, as unplanned, as unmechanical as any story can be; it seems to be going nowhere but it is going everywhere. There is no beginning, middle, and end; it is just an episode that dangles. Here Chekhov demonstrates how flexible the form of the short story can be. Further, Mark Schorer's claim that a story means "revelation" and the novel "evolution" does not fit. This story does study change (even on the reader's part), and it also suggests a sense of continuing life, of whole lives; the past, the present, and the future have coalesced to evolve the idea of general hypnosis. Here is the remarkable art of telescoping. The complaint that the story is only a fragment does not fit either; the part comes to represent the whole in "Gooseberries." Even the much criticized episodic structure fits Chekhov's intended rhythm, his manner of viewing life. Chekhov saw that life did not happen in neat beginnings, middles, and ends. Human problems are not solved so neatly; they go on and on. Chekhov conceived his plotless, episodic stories to capture this rhythm of life. And the characters—characters in short stories are usually criticized as "flat" and uncomplicated—work together to create a combination of moods and anxieties that humanize the ambivalences and ambiguities in the Russian soul.
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