SHORT STORY AS A DISABLED GENRE
In his book How to Read and Why (being in a way an appendix to the monumental The Western Canon) published in 2001, Harold Bloom devoted a set of texts to short stories. As it turns out, he uses two main criteria for this genre of prose: short story is either an act of pure contemplation of a detail, a fragment of reality that sets you ideally to some larger whole that is not given at the moment, or it is confronting the reader with strangeness, a riddle. In the first class, the Professor of the Yale University mentions for example The Hunter's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev, while the fundamental representatives of the other type are short stories by Borges. For Bloom, between those two types of narration there is a wide range of possible directions in which the art of telling short stories can go. In both cases, however, the important thing is that the author decides on the minor form, if the size of the text is considered, but a form very imbued with art, vision, symbolism, the form that takes its strength exactly from its internal content, sharp compositional framework and condensation of various writing techniques in a tiny space.
The first this year issue of Cracovian “Dekada Literacka” (1/2007) makes a goal of, to quote Robert Ostaszewski’s introduction, putting the proverbial cat among the pigeons, being in the same time aware that pigeons may stay indifferent. It is because the way short stories function on our literary market is a unique phenomenon: we still suffer from the sentiment for thick volumes in glossy covers, for the worlds where you can move in for a couple of evenings, as one of the authors in the volume suggests [Inga Iwasiów Opowiadanie opowiadania opowiadania… / A short story short stories short stories ]. The decision to buy or even reach for a collection of minor narrations that did not aim at painting the whole of social reality, experiences of generations but were created only for the sole act of telling a story or for micrological observation of a fragment of our world seems to be, in the light of confessions made by “Dekada”'s authors, an embarrassing act that can be really understood neither by statistical readers nor by statistical publishers. The sociology of a short story as a literary genre is directly connected with the rank a given author has on the market: if he is a beginner then there are no chances that a respectable publisher would bring out a collection of his stories first; it has to be a larger whole, at least aspiring to the label of a novel. A writer with an already established name can allow himself a bit more freedom: a volume of stories will even be approved by the editor and may become a simple way of keeping the demand for the given writer's name, for example after receiving a literary award.
Publishers’ efforts result in a monstrous theoretical and literary confusion: texts that originally appeared in anthologies as short stories pulled from their original context and published as a separate books, suddenly become novels. Bernadetta Darska in her article Kobieta opowiada / A woman tells gives the meaningful example of Ślad po mamie / A Remnant of the Mom by Marta Dzido, in which case for every successive edition different genre criteria were used that were not that much definable once and for all as rather depending on whether something is perceived as a separate print or a fragment of some bigger editorial project. De facto, the ennoblement (are we right to say so?) to being a novel is decided on the basis of some external non-literary criteria that are secondary to the artistic creation itself.
Meanwhile, as the authors in the issue, especially Krzysztof Uniłowski connected with “FA-art” quaterly (first part of his essay Mit powieści mieszczańskiej / Myth of a bourgeois novel ), seem to assume, apart from the problems connected with the literary market we suffer from a kind of grief after the modern novel, which aspired to present a complete picture of many generations of a family, a kind of socio-historic fresco with detailed psychological portraits and broadly represented cultural background at the same time. Of course, as Jacek Dukaj remarked some time ago on the pages of “Gazeta Wyborcza”, the romantic desire for a ”fat” novel, a heavy brick is still there in us; there is still something like a myth of a thick novel for long preferably winter evenings and Iwasiów writes exactly about this myth when she asks why we don't want to transfer between successive possible worlds that open with every short story; instead we'd rather stick to an immediate whole “galaxy” of a novel. Meanwhile everything becomes stunted; the promise of totality given by the concept of a novel some decades ago today is illusory. The texts published by young writers have difficulties catching up with the down limit of 150 pocket size pages, not to mention writing any “bigger” prose. Novels get stunted to such an extend that the main accusation against them is the accusation that they are in fact mere collections of short stories! Miasto utrapienia / City of Woes by Jerzy Pilch is a telling example here as it is a novel constructed around a relatively weak anecdotal concept that allows to more or less tie the texts together, which in a different case would lead completely independent literary lives (as is true of Narty Ojca Świętego / The Holy Father Skis from this novel). The author if this article himself is guilty of torturing Paweł Huelle’s Ostatnia wieczerza / The Last Supper during classes in Polish philology. That novel can also be accused of being a reservoir of ideas for a few short stories, which were closed in a lampoon form of a competition with the friar Jankowski. It is meaningful that both authors quoted above have already been recognised as writers of brilliant short stories (Magda Lubelska writes about the latest Moje pierwsze samobójstw / The First Time I Committed Suicide by Jerzy Pilch in the same issue of “Dekada”). There was a time when Pilch was a patron of editorial competition for the best modern short story conducted by “Polityka” magazine; thus he put his signature under the tradition of instigating the art of a short story and keeping it alive, the same thing done in New York by Paul Auster (cf. I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s).
Maybe the time has come to call a spade a spade? – one should ask. Maybe now it's the time, concurrently with, in the Polish case, late coming of post-modern formation, for the short story to cover all that is different, smaller, one would say marginal, and become a dominant genre? We would need, however, to purify it from lies of not only the language of literary criticism, but also the language of publishers created for the promotion of books. Let’s be frank: we're publishing a longer short story, not a novel. The latter concept has behind it too tremendous and too overpowering a tradition to staple oneself on to it; and a short story itself is not a disabled genre. Therefore I’m looking forward to the next issue of “Dekada” – hopefully the second part of Uniłowski’s article will show the way.
Michał Choptiany
Translated by Anna Skrajna
Discussed journals: Dekada Literacka