MEMORABLE OPENINGS
THE SHORT STORY: AN INTRODUCTION
“I don’t know when I died” (Samuel Beckett, “The Calmative”)
“Unfortunately, things did not turn out well …” (D.H. Lawrence, “The Fox”)
“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke” (James Joyce, “The Sisters”)
These words constitute one of those master effect openings that make of the short story an elevated art and craft. The curtain raises and the miniature world of plot twists, viewpoints, framing devices, enticing and playful effects give rise to a narrative form whose defining criterion goes beyond length. Intensity and unity will mark the path.
In Joyce’s “There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke,” Kahn points that “a character´s fate is revealed even before ‘he’ has been described.
Andrew Kahn’s “The Short Story. A very Short Introduction” (chapters 1-3 for this section) can be used as a point of departure that will aid to understand the dawning of the short story as a genre. From its first appearance in magazines and newspapers --slicker magazines for quality stories, pulp magazines for other thrills -- hand in hand with the development of the printed press, the Industrial Age, the increase in readership, short story writing became an outlet for amateurish as well as professional writers. These are some of the platitudes that pepper the dawning of the genre.
Whereas the big openings of literature such as Tolstoy’s “All happy families are happy in the same way but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina) raises a world of expectations that will spin throughout the novel, in short stories, opening lines constitute a first act. Kahn compares Tolstoy’s opening with Joy Williams’ “Hammer”
“Angela had only one child, a daughter who abhorred her” (p.16)
“like Anna Karenina, this start is also about family relations, but concerns one famly and one relationship rather than bourgeois families in the abstract. Yet, as Frank O’Connor notes in The Lonely Voice, every significant literary story has an initial thesis, covert or declared, beyond the development of the plot.”
The short story has been grounds to explore the rural, the national, the small and has shaped later into the perfect terrain to explore those edgy subjects of a globalized world.
Frank O’Connor, V.S.Pritchett, Ray Bradbury, Alice Munro, V.S.Pritchett, Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, a chapter entirely devoted to Chekhov and its heirs, take over as the stronghold of short story writing among many others...which we will sinfully forget in this inaugural season post. One particular statement should be cited to capture the spirit of short story writing, and that is, the allusion to Katherine Mansfield that “dates back as early as 1923,” Andrew Kahn says, “when a critic of The Observer proclaimed that the short story is bound to begin with her name,”
“whose (Katherine Mansfield's) ability to crystallize ‘ in a cry, a phrase, a gesture, a moment of feeling or vision’ captures what was best about the genre that also set it apart from the novel.” (page 12)
