Hugh Kenner - Studies in Change

NARRATIVE, the recital of a chain of happenings, has held the Western imagination since Homer the Singer of Tales: it is the oldest creative use of language of which record remains. Five of us (says Odysseus) drove the smoking pole down into the Cyclops' eye; and as my weight bore it down they twisted it to and fro, as shipwrights drill a timber, till his eye's blood boiled up around the burning wood, and his eyestrings crackled in the heat....--a sailor's tale, told in port. Or the hunter in the Grettir Saga tells how he knocked off balance the bear at the cliff edge, lopping one of its paws with his axe. A tale is a thing told; tale and tell are nearly the same word; there are marvels in the world, says the tale-teller, which, having known them, I can bring before your mind, if you will surrender yourself to my voice. My voice shall be your summons to belief. I shall relive the thing again in the telling, and shall talk as I relive it, and it shall be as if I were making the words up as I go along. I shall make you see what I see, and feel what I feel; we shall be astonished together, terrified together, valorous together. I shall submit myself again, for your enjoyment and my own, to dangers once already undergone (do not tax me with being a great liar), and no one, when we come past the crisis of the tale, shall see the Cyclops safely blinded, or the bear disabled, with more relief than I. Once upon a time....

His art, in tavern or bivouac, by a small night fire or on the deck of a ship, wherever men have time to kill and attention to divert, is always the same: to unite our imaginations, instant by instant, with events made real. His art is at the core of the story-writer's art; but the short story is something different. Story is nearly the same word as history: a methodical record, something with system to it, very likely not told but written down; and the writing reread, and revised and improved. In it, happenings are related--but more than that, something is examined. Many a short story, but no tale, is a kind of case history. The genre as we understand it today was developed within a century or less,

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in a time of careful recording. Its authority is no longer the narrator's voice, but the relevance of a set of facts.

We can see its elements in Samuel Johnson "Ned Druggett" ( 1758), which compresses two stories into a mere thousand words. The stories are told simultaneously. They comprise the same events, rotate about the same man, and are told, moreover, in the same words. One is the success story of a remnant dealer who by courtesy, diligence, and application--good mercantile virtues--rises unspoiled to prosperity and a country house. The other is a tale of mounting and pathetic illusion. Ned's friends in the old days would see him take his only recreation, which was "to stand at his own door and look into the street," for he was putting every penny into the business. And when he has grown rich enough to go some hours every week to his lodging in the country, knowing that "when a man advances in life he loves to entertain himself sometimes with his own thoughts," then to his old friends he recommends the pleasures of Meditation, for he has been "all the morning at the window, counting the carriages as they passed before him."

Ned has ended substantially where he began, only more prosperous and more deeply entoiled in illusion. This second story is one that can be told of him, but it is not one that he would be in a position to tell, for it never occurs to him to doubt that he is happy. Johnson, moreover, tells it in such a way that not a word of his account would offend or disillusion Ned. He does not hint or wink, however; he tells it, firmly and clearly, to anyone sensitive to the notation of his careful prose, from the moment when, informing us that in his penurious days Ned's only recreation was to look into the street, he places an enhancing capital letter on Recreation. A few lines later, we are told that Ned's reputation soon extended "from one end of the street to the other" in exactly the tone, and exactly the form of words, that would speak of fame spreading from China to Peru. Careful phrase by careful phrase the chronicle proceeds, rehearsing only facts, but balancing Ned's view of them against another view, until we are ready to respond to the rich tragicomedy of the climax. This climax is contained in eight deliberate words, epitome of a life forever managed, forever kept prudently free of impulse, ardor, rashness, joy: "But at last he resolved to be happy." Everything else in Ned's life it has been plausible, nay admirable, that he should make resolutions about, but not this. The resolved happiness occupies a single paragraph, pregnant with paradoxes Johnson is too scrupulous to underline--the fresh air, and the closed window; quiet and contemplation, and elevation to the highest dignities of a Shopkeeper; the pleasures of Meditation, and the counting of carriages; and not least, the pleasures of meditation, and Ned's need to convince invited guests that these pleasures are real, and that he really experiences them.

As in the tale, every sentence is made up of facts: things said, things

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done. But the Story invites us, indeed, unless we are going to find it pointless, requires us, to consider how differently people may value the same set of facts. This is perhaps the minimum formula for the short story, that it is concerned with how experiences are valued: not merely what was said and done, but what difference it made to someone. Men move through affairs they only partly understand, says the story-writer; I narrate this affair as carefully as I can, so that you can see why it matters: what someone learned or failed to learn, felt or did not feel, saw or failed to see; and you who read, if you read well, will at the end understand better than anyone; better even, perhaps, than I.

It follows that the short story has no set form, no set procedure. It may use a show of careful documentation, or it may not even tell us the principal character's name. It may start with setting, or with action, or with conversation. It may end when activity ends, or it may meditate after the ending of activity. The real action may commence in the reader's mind, after he has lifted up his eyes from the last words on the last page. The contract between reader and writer is simple and contains only two clauses. The writer will import no irrelevancies, the reader will give his undivided attention. These are, of course, complementary stipulations.

James Joyce, who wrote only fifteen short stories before he abandoned the form forever at twenty-five, pared off irrelevances by so heroic an effort that one could learn almost the whole discipline of responsive reading from the text of