The Short Story Should Never Have Existed In The First Place

Philip Traylen Delivers Our Most Dyspeptic Piece Yet

Dear Republic,

Hate-On-The-Short-Story-Week continues at The Republic of Letters, with

Naomi Kanakia

passing on the irate torch to Philip Traylen. Traylen is one of the wild men of Substack Notes. I honestly had no idea what to expect when commissioning this piece and was blown away by the combination of erudition and intensity. You may well disagree with it — and, by the way, as the short story defenders proliferate in the comments, I would encourage you to write a full-length response if sufficiently offended — but I do challenge you to read all the way through without laughing even once.

-ROL

THE SHORT STORY SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE

The beginning of Amy Hempel’s “In The Tub,” the first story in her Collected Stories (2006):

At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath.

My cat takes naps in the windowbox. Her gray chin is powdered with the iridescent dust from butterfly wings. If I tap on the glass, the cat will not look up.

The sound that I make is not food.

The story’s Hempelesque protagonist, trapped inside her object-contoured present, spends most of her time looking at things. She makes it clear that within the circumference of her mundanity she can also do certain things (‘I can stand in the light… If I tap on the glass, the cat will not look up’) but such gestures are presented as hypothetical (can… if…). Her primary task is to look at things; she looks at the flowerpots on her deck, she notices that one is empty. Her vision is sometimes loosely quantitative, sometimes precise — she notices, for example, that the cat’s chin has something on it.

Like almost every other short story written since 1900, the action unfolds somewhere between indoors and the so-called ‘liminal space’ of the suburban garden. As if tasked from above to exemplify this tendency, the protagonist of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” (1964) crosses Westchester County, New York by swimming through an endless series of garden pools. Hempel’s adroitly cultivated ‘I-just-dusted-my-house-but-now-I’m-in-my-garden’ aesthetic offers a gendered update of the same tendency (the dog-like short story male prowls around the outside of a house; the short story female, like a sort of yoga-troll, inhabits the threshold).

Amy Hempel, the innocent-seeming short story writer who is in fact the villain of this piece

In the Introduction to Hempel’s Collected Stories, an individual going by the name of Rick Moody defends the dusting-and-noticing aesthetic on quasi-political grounds:

It’s about survival. It’s about the sentences used to enact and defend survival…. The best we can do is to try to keep on living and to take pleasure where it is available, especially, for example, in the pleasure of language.

Ceci n’est pas Rick Moody

Yes, these days everyone loves admitting defeat in a tone of beguiled self-congratulation. But he’s not wrong; his thesis is borne out in the forced miniaturism of the stories that follow, where time contracts to ‘day’ and life contracts to ‘I’. The job of this I, living inside this day, is to have ‘luminous’ experiences, or at least to present the experiences which it has as luminous; if they manage this, they receive an annual stipend of $65,000.

Hempel’s contraction of life and time to I plus day is symptomatic of the aggrieved positivism (a kind of ‘positive capability,’ in opposition to Keats’ negative one) characteristic of almost every contemporary short story. From the beginning of “Godmother Tea,” selected at random from The Best American Short Stories 2020:

But since the mirror was standing there, I’d sometimes creep up late at night to wordlessly articulate a complaint I’d been having with myself. The objects of my apartment looked on as I stood balletically, searching my figure for bad news. My reflection belonged to too many other people—​mainly the people who used to own all this stuff. Through me, my ancestors gave eyes to my jacked-up third position. I’d switch to tree pose, clutching a glass of rosé to my chest like a good-luck charm.

The sentences seem here to have been run through by a kind word-plough, possibly to fulfill some performative editorial requirement (“make it read like it’s been edited at least ten times, for no reason”). As a result, the prose hangs on truncated metaphors whose only function is ‘being metaphors’ (“searching my figure for bad news”). The overall goal of this kind of short story seems to be: ‘break out of Weberian disenchantment by paying a bit more attention to things.’ An enormous aesthetic burden is therefore placed on ‘perceiving mundane objects in a new light.’ In practice, these objects do nothing but throw the light back (‘luminosity’), and the story freights itself into emptiness.

Heidi Pitlor’s Foreword to the same book (which is followed by an Introduction, if you need more help reading a short story) quotes one of its other stories approvingly, revealing something of the genre’s ideological system:

The world had been reduced. But it was there still, solid, tangible, as real as the fur of the cat — ​whichever cat — ​that happened to be asleep in her lap, asleep, and purring.

Thus spake the retractive ghost of the nineteenth-century bourgeois, in love with all that is solid, tangible and real, materialist sans matériel. But you must imagine the ghost-woman happy. History is a nightmare from which she’s already awoken; she did it by staring at a cat.¹ But if only it were so easy. The cat is solid, tangible and real not because, as she nonchalantly claims, it’s whichever cat (as if plucked at random from some ever-replenishing Cat Commons), but because it’s her cat. Rather than offering a foothold in the sensuous, the cat’s furry purring eulogises dead capital. Nevertheless, Ms. Pitlor ends the Foreword encouragingly: “May these stories draw you in, move you, and provide you comfort in the face of whatever you may be experiencing right now.”

But perhaps it’s not fair to quote Forewords; no one means what they say in a Foreword. On his personal website, Greg Hollingshead, Professor of English in Canada, offers a more philosophical defence of the short story:

In a good short story the meaning is not so abstractable, so portable, as it must be in a novel, but is rather more tightly and ineffably embodied in the formal details of the text. A scene in a short story — and there may be only one — operates with a centripetal force of concentration. But a scene in a novel spins off a good deal of its energy looking not only backward and forward in the text but also sideways, outside the text, toward the material world, to that set of common assumptions considered ordinary life. That energy is centrifugal, opening out, not constantly seeking to revolve upon its own still centre.

The short story, then, believes wholeness can be achieved by historical reduction, by a slicing away of everything but the self and its surroundings (room, door, mirror, garden, porch). Rather than sacrificially participate in the aborted ontogenesis of everything (the novel), the short story demands, in exchange for its smallness, a totality of its own; the short story pursues a poetics not so much of I (as contemporary autofiction does) as of my. The poetics of the poem, conversely, would be the opposite: no one’s, as in no one’s sleep / under so many / eyes.²

But the question of the relation between ‘short stories’ and ‘poetry’ constantly recurs. Greg from before, writing for the University of Toronto Quarterly, argues that in the ‘ordinary but strange’ work of his compatriot Alice Munro, “the unhappy bifurcation of poetry and history is once again revealed as the pernicious cultural illusion it is.” I haven’t read anything by Alice Munro. But a poem exists in the mouth. Where does the short story exist? In the garden? Inside its own digestive tissue?

Greg Hollingshead, the equally unassuming Canadian academic who is the piece’s co-villain

One way of understanding why the short story is not poetry is reading poetry. From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Prufrock is almost a short story character; he’s alone, he’s self-absorbed, he’s indoors. But he’s not looking at anything; if he sees, it’s primarily by voice, like a bat. He’s indoors, but he nevertheless inhabits a world, not an apartment; lumpen materiality is a fact, not a requirement. This is because Eliot, qua poet, splits form and content asunder, then bashes them against each other like planets in the heavens. Prufrock is a fragment, a spark in infinite space. His loneliness, being both worldly and extreme, wants to overcome itself; the result is music. This process — even its first condition, loneliness — would seem to the apartment-realist of the contemporary short story almost biblically quaint. I’m not lonely, says the contemporary short story, only alone — a totality, as Greg Hollingshead puts it on his website. My aloneness is the glue that seals the congruence between content and form; I am become Concept; I have transcended Art.

There are at least two ways out of this hole; Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015) is one. Electing to live not in an apartment, but rather in a rural cottage, Bennett pushes her body against the mirror of history; she permits history to remain a nightmare (and therefore also a dream) at the far end of her kaleidoscopic corporeality. As she says:

If you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable… it doesn’t matter how many years you have lived there, you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay.

And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.

Opening out at last; out, out, out.

Don’t wake yourself up, rather wake up history. Tread softly on its dreams. Maybe let it go down on you.

At last, we meet the hero of the piece

Correlatively, there’s no sustained I in Pond, but rather an endless series of fluid triangulations of I, you, and it. The narrator ist Geist, and since the narrator ist Geist, the language is its own:

I notice the fullness of the moon when I come out of the supermarket — it’s right there in front of me when the automatic doors retreat. The sky isn’t yet black so the moon has a sovereignty it doesn’t often possess — but in a way it looks as if it is coping with stage fright. Yes, it is as if the curtains have just opened on it! And so low is it that it seems only natural and forthright to reach out to the cowering moon. Pssst, take it easy, fix your gaze on something and get your balance babyface— that’s right, I’m bucking up the moon of all things — and yes, look, it’s as if in fact the moon has closed it eyes and is taking a slow inhalation.

Bennett’s language revolves like a searchlight over the contours of ontology; Hempel tries to trap light in the test tube of the veridical self (misquoting Swift: it’s like trying to farm light using cucumbers).³ But cucumbers grow outside, and ‘wolves in shells,’ as runs one of Pond’s epigraphs, ‘are crueller than stray ones.’⁴

Way back in 1914, Lukács worried that, after Dostoevsky had opened the only door on earth, no one would walk through it; the ‘sterile power of the merely existent’ would win out.⁵ He was largely right; it’s won, and it’s been called luminous. But there are exceptions: Pond celebrates instead the comical beauty of the exorbitantly existent. And then — for other hole-escapers — there’s autofiction, which while obviously an outgrowth of the day plus I American short story, has nothing to do with dusting or owning apartments. At its best, its goal is to clean out the I itself, to winnow down the first-person pronoun until it resembles a blade. And while it seems that no one yet knows what this blade is for — autofiction is a method, not a form — there are possibilities. One might use it, for example, to cut through the frozen-over surface of the human heart.⁶ Whatever emerges will be unable to breathe — the mouth-to-mouth lyricism characteristic of Bennett’s eminently unfrozen Pond will need to be immediately applied.

Philip Traylen is a diarist-philosopher from London. He writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew.

1. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Ulysses (1922)

2. The end of Rilke’s last poem, translation adjusted a little (eyelids is the worst word in the English language).

3. “He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air.”(from Gulliver’s Travels).

4. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958

5. The Theory of the Novel

6. ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ [“Ein Buch muss die Axt für das gefrorene Meer in uns sein”]. Kafka, “Letter to Oskar Pollak,” 27 January 1904.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Imaginary Iceberg” (1935) dramatises the ontological suicide of the contemporary short story, via the idea of ice, so perfectly that I can’t resist. It begins:

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy
rock and all the sea were moving marble.

Omitting the last three lines, the poem ends:

This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.