The Oxford Library of Classic English Short Stories I-II. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION These volumes of twentieth-century short stories in English cover a wide range of human experience, comic and tragic, strange and everyday, life on both sides of the tracks; in styles of writing they are equally varied. Can we then speak of the art of the short story as if it is a clearly defined form like the sonnet or the ode? In English there is no single word for the form: we have to make do with two words, whereas German has novelle and Erzählung and French has nouvelle and conle. But the short story is far from being merely a truncated version of the novel. It may not have precise rules, but it aims at certain effects not usually attempted in longer fictions. Jorge Luis Borges has said that the short story 'has more of discovery about it than of deliberate invention'; Kipling held that it must have what he called 'economy of implication'; and most strikingly Chekhov declared that if an author describes a gun hanging on the wall on page one then that gun sooner or later must go off. These statements amount to a tentative programme for a form of writing bound to a principle of necessity working within a limited space of language with carefully proportioned inter-related parts. We are dealing with a single powerful impulse from a single impression (or discovery), something very different from the multiform pattern and the large idea of the novel. To look for a pedigree for the form leads to the uncovering of a misunderstanding. H. E. Bates, another master practitioner, writes of the short story's long history: the episode of Cain and Abel in Genesis is a short story and so is the New Testament parable of the prodigal son. But a httle later he writes: 'The history of the English short story is very brief, for the simple reason that before the end of the nineteenth century it had no history.' The apparent contradiction is due to a confusion between the modern short story and the traditional oral tale. The oral tale entertains, but it also conveys wisdom, religious or moral, or the mere good sense of folk tradition. It has been handed down in great repositories like the Arabian Nights, 'Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron. It is found in the more romantic fictions of the Old Testament, the story of Samson in Judges, or that of Susanna and the elders in the Apocrypha. It does not have to be