[In the following essay, Joselyn maintains that a reading of Porter's “The Grave” “will serve to illustrate several of the main characteristics of the ‘lyric’ short story.”]

To those who enjoy the short story and are inclined to take it seriously as an art form, it is a constant source of surprise to find that although the genre has been with us for several centuries, there is still a marked dearth of systematic criticism concerning it. Thus, histories of the short story tend to be pedestrian, anthologies reprint and reprint the old chestnuts, and anything like a morphology of the genre is simply lacking. A few decades ago it was the fashion to classify short narratives as stories-of-plot, stories-of-action, stories-of-mood, and so on, perhaps by analogy with older, more mechanical views of the novel. Later the terms “art story” and “formula story”¹ began to be bandied about, but were never really satisfactory as classifications because they cloaked value judgments under the guise of “scientific” ones. Still later, stories were likely to be labeled “plotted” or “plotless,” designations that had a certain pedagogical convenience but, again, rested upon a misunderstanding or at best a half truth. Even now, several of the most widely used college texts—all published, surprisingly enough, under the aegis of the New Criticism—do not go far beyond the old divisions of “plot stories,” “character stories,” “theme stories,” and “mood stories,” although one book does include a section devoted to the “problem story,”² while another³ groups together stories by Chekhov, Joyce, Faulkner, and others as “Special Problems.” One of the most prestigious texts frankly takes cover under “Aristotle's scheme of Complication, Resolution, Peripety and Discovery,” referred to as “one of the basic patterns of the human imagination,” a scheme that has “acquired a fresh interest in our own time. …”⁴

I should like to suggest that the time is ripe for a serious, empirical study of the forms of the short story and that we might undertake this classification by recognizing two basic, recurrent kinds of stories which, for lack of better terms, I shall call the “mimetic” and the “lyric.”⁵ All stories, of course, have a “mimetic” base, and many, perhaps the majority, achieve their entire effect by presenting in ordinary prose a chronologically straightforward series of events whose significance is contained in and completed by the resolution of the events. Other stories, however, by means of the amalgamation of additional elements into the mimetic base, elements characteristically expected in verse, constitute what I have called a class of “lyric” stories. (It may be that the peculiar “signature” of each story writer arises from the special proportion of “mimetic” and “lyric” in his narratives. I believe that an examination of, for example, Dubliners along these lines would serve to identify Joyce's peculiar accomplishment in the short story more effectively than any means devised so far.) The “poetic” elements which, in my view, sometimes appear in the prose narrative, include (1) marked deviation from chronological sequence, (2) exploitation of purely verbal resources such as tone and imagery, (3) a concentration upon increased awareness rather than upon a completed action, and (4) a high degree of suggestiveness, emotional intensity, achieved with a minimum of means.

Proof of the existence of these two basic types of stories—the “mimetic” and the “lyric”—and demonstration of their respective traits might be made in various ways, for instance, by comparing representative stories of each type, by sketching two hypothetical stories based on the same incidents, or by comparing both a mimetic and a lyric story to a poem.⁶ In this study, I shall, however, assume that what is meant by a “mimetic” story is self-evident, but that clarification of what is meant by a “lyric” story may be helpful. A reading of Katherine Anne Porter's “The Grave”⁷ will serve to illustrate several of the main characteristics of the “lyric” story.

Like other “lyrical” short stories, “The Grave” focuses on a very narrow segment of action through which a universal experience, or quality of experience, is revealed. It may be noted, further, that in its arrangement of events, the poetic story appears by comparison with the well-proportioned action of the typical beginning-middle-end story to be awkward, disconnected and fragmentary. Thus “The Grave,” for example, moves from a rambling account of a childhood experience—or rather two experiences closely connected in time but not at all, apparently, in importance—to a brief scene occurring much later, the story unfolding in sections of three pages, two pages, and one page in length. Obviously, the particular beauties of order and articulation, if they are to be found in the lyrical story, must be sought elsewhere than in the ordonnance of action.

As a matter of fact, a summary of the story's outward action does not really explicate its structure, for, while retaining the residual “syllogistic form” required in narrative, the poetic story often utilizes in addition a complex counter-action. Thus “The Grave” includes a secondary, “hovering” action in which the presiding consciousness moves among the events as it seeks to “know” and to “see”: “After he had got the dove in his hand, Paul said, ‘Don't you know what this is?’” (p. 71); “… she had vague stirrings of desire for luxury and a grand way of living which could not take precise form in her imagination” (pp. 74–75); “… she wanted most deeply to see and to know. Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along” (p. 76); later, “the episode of that far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind's eye” (p. 78); and finally, “she saw clearly her brother … turning the silver dove over and over in his hands” (p. 78). This second, oscillatory movement gives unity to the seemingly fragmented actions of the plot, but also fulfills an important thematic function.

As the syllogistic plot rests upon the inexorable onward flow of time which conditions the events and to some extent the quality of experience, the secondary action expresses another dominant motif in human existence, man's attempt to isolate certain happenings from the flux of time, to hold them static, to probe to their inwardness and grasp their meaning. In this respect the “lyrical” bodies forth both man's immersion in time and his transcendence of it. In addition, the secondary action invites and indeed forces the reader himself to become involved in the integrating process of the central consciousness, sharing the probing and discovery in which that consciousness is engaged. The reader participates directly also in the protagonist's total, final vision. Thus the employment of a secondary structural device characteristic of poetry—a pattern of qualitative progression—superimposed upon the conventional syllogistic form of narrative serves to increase plot unity, to deepen psychological immediacy and to express thematic significance in the “lyric” story.

Among the more purely verbal elements exploited in the “lyric” story, the symbol may be the most significant, a fact not difficult to demonstrate in “The Grave,” in which Miss Porter relies on four talismanic objects to create meaning: the grave itself, the ring, the dove, and the rabbits. Since most of these are traditional symbols, they bring to the story more profound overtones than the mere events could sustain.

The opening scene at the abandoned family cemetery presents the graves literally as “pits all shaped alike with purposeful accuracy.” To Miranda, “Even if it had once contained a coffin for years upon years, when the coffin was gone, a grave was just a hole in the ground.” But the themes of love, marriage, fidelity, love, death, eternity, as well as religious overtones, are introduced in the narrative details and in direct references to the grandfather's “long repose,” the grandmother's setting out as if to find her own burial place “knowing well she would never return to the places she had left,” and the final burial of the old couple side by side “for eternity.” These religious associations are reinforced when we are told that as Miranda and Paul went exploring “one burning day,” they found the graves “lying open and empty” (pp. 69–70).

Significantly, it is in the graves, with their “pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell,” that Miranda comes upon the silver dove and Paul the “thin wide gold ring carved with intricate flowers and leaves.” These relics of the pseudo-resurrection they exchange in a curious parody of the ritual of mating, “with some little bickering.” As the boy and girl continue their exploring and their hunt, Miranda wears the wedding ring on her thumb where “it fitted perfectly … shining with the serene purity of fine gold” and dreams of a “grand way of living which could not take precise form in her imagination.” The reflections and feelings the ring stirs within Miranda continue until the moment when the children see a rabbit and Miranda lets the boy, the possessor of the silver dove, shoot it “without dispute” (pp. 70–75). Later, as the “mated” children kneel facing each other over the symbolic birth of their young, Miranda touches one of the unborn rabbits “ever so carefully,” exclaiming, “Ah there's blood running over them,” and begins to tremble “without knowing why” (p. 76).

In this scene, all the symbols, the grave—death, burial, corruption, resurrection, eternity; the dove—love, faithfulness, wisdom, the soul, martyrdom;⁸ the ring—love, union, marriage, beauty, the cycle of existence, fidelity, permanency; the rabbits—life, death, birth, blood, prey, for a moment coalesce in a rich overflow of meaning. The scene passes, the symbolic meanings disintegrate, only to be mysteriously catalyzed again for a final moment in the scene at the market-place. Years later, picking her way through the “puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city” Miranda is confronted without warning with “the episode of that far-off day.” She finds herself

… so reasonlessly horrified she halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back of them. An Indian vendor had heaped up before her a tray of dyed sugar sweets, in the shapes of all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla, maybe. … It was a very hot day and the smell of the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the open cemetery at home: the day … she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves … she saw clearly her brother … standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands.

(p. 78)

It is the symbols from the earlier scene—the grave, the ring, the dove, and the rabbits—which come together again in Miranda's consciousness and shape the final significance of the story. The juxtaposition of the cemetery (dead) visited by the children and their experience of the dead rabbits-which-seemed-alive with the market (living) with the dead (inanimate) but-seemingly-live rabbits forms only one of the many ironic reversals that serve to dramatize the themes of the story. The child Miranda has vanished, and so has the gold wedding ring. But the silver dove, mysterious and eternal, remains absolutely untouched, as it is turned in the hands of the boy transfixed with it and by it amid the “raw flesh and wilting flowers,” the sweetness and corruption of the life of the world. In her “vision” Miranda achieves a final form of knowing, and the story attains completion through the intensive evocativeness provided by the interlocked symbols, an essentially poetic device.

Katherine Anne Porter also uses skillfully another verbal resource, tone, in her development of “The Grave.” She has chosen a retrospective, elegiac, somewhat dream-like tone marked by an undercurrent of excitement that occasionally flows over into near-hysteria, as in the market-place scene. The elegiac tone is especially suitable for the protagonist's pondering over remembered events carried on through interior conversation. Flexible enough to permit both descents to naturalism (the scene with the dead rabbits) and ascents to symbolic evocation, the tone is sufficiently steady and pervasive to unify the story's highly complex themes, and fragmented action. In such a brief story, tone itself can do much to increase suggestiveness; its effective use is a part of the economy of means exercised by the writer of the “lyric” story.

“The Grave,” then, may be taken as representative of a class of short stories which retain the essentials of narrative yet incorporate elements generally associated with poetry to reflect and enrich consciousness. The borrowing of poetic techniques for prose forms which is such a well-attested fact in the literary history of the last century or so may be viewed with alarm as what John Wain calls the new “confusion of genres” or may be welcomed in the belief that “the forms and technique of verse were not equal to the immense expansion of the imagination into regions which it would take prose fiction to settle and colonize.”⁹ Doubtless, to those interested in the type of narrative that has been termed the “lyrical” short story, poetry's loss was fiction's gain.

Notes

1. See, for example, Warren Beck, “Art and Formula in the Short Story,” College English, V (1943), pp. 55–62. Beck also lists other pairs of terms supposedly descriptive of main branches of the story.

2. Ray B. West, Jr. and R. W. Stallman, The Art of Fiction (New York, 1949).

3. Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York, 1943).

4. Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, The House of Fiction (New York, 1950), p. ix.

5. This study was substantially complete before the publication of Ralph Freedman's The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, 1963). My study was in manuscript, also, before the appearance of Daniel Curley's “Treasure in ‘The Grave,’” Modern Fiction Studies, IX (1964), 377–384. I would heartily second Mr. Curley's views that the story is “the patient attempt of the writer to lead the reader to the point at which he can feel what the writer felt” (p. 377) and that “Katherine Anne Porter is merely talking about the children in ‘The Grave’ and … means quite other things … this story reveals the whole pattern of her fable and allows us to evaluate the fragments we find in other stories.” (p. 384)

6. I have spent some interesting hours contrasting Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited” and Porter's “The Grave” and also exploring the resemblances between Yeats's “Among School Children” and “The Grave.”

7. References throughout this paper will be to the edition of “The Grave” published in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (New York, 1934), pp. 69–80, and will be indicated in the text.

8. Arthur S. Barnes notes that in the Christian context—and that appears to be the correct one in which to read “The Grave”—the dove has traditionally symbolized the Christian soul and the Holy Ghost, baptism, the Eucharist, inspiration and divine guidance, martyrdom, the Church, the Ascension (dove in flight) and the hope of resurrection (doves on the sarcophagus). Cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1909), V, 144–145.

9. The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution (London, 1957), p. 15.