Modern Short Stories [antikvár]

Foreword In any reasonably definable sense, the short story has existed as a literary form for less than a hundred years, and the significant differences among short stories are not historical differences but differences in mode, in the attitudes toward life which govern an author's sense of reality and the techniques of expression these attitudes dictate. For this reason above all, the best way to arrange a volume of short stories is by types or kinds rather than in a chronological pattern intended to indicate some not very significant historical development. Arranging stories by types has critical and even practical advantages. Like the lyric poem, the short story is a concentrated and often elliptical form, dependent for its success on feeling and suggestion. But which elements in a given story are charged with feeling, and therefore highly suggestive, and which are merely literal or conventional depends on what kind of story it is. If we have been reading Henry James and have learned to focus our attention on those elements that are most suggestive in his kind of story, we may, if not warned, carry over to our reading of D. H. Lawrence the same focus of attention, and thus find ourselves scrutinizing with every care elements that are insignificant in Lawrence's kind of story, and failing to notice—or finding irrelevant—the elements that for Lawrence are the significant ones in the story. It is difficult not to believe that the familiar complaints against James—that his people are snobbish and that in his stories nothing happens—like the familiar complaints against Lawrence—that he is obsessed with sex and strident—are not so much stupid as a consequence of misdirected attention such as I have been trying to describe. For the purpose of avoiding this kind of misdirected attention, IX