ENGL 4310

So here is the thing I kept forgetting in class on Tuesday:

Neena kept using the word “control.” Here is my take on the short story. I have a theory (that I, myself, can think of exceptions to, but let’s move past that—there will be exceptions to everything).

I think a way to set a short story apart from a novel (and a novel from a novella and a short story from a piece of micro-fiction, etc.) is to look at what is asked of the reader. It is my opinion that the longer the piece of work is, the less work the reader is asked to do. If someone reads ^War and Peace, they are not asked to fill in a lot of details. Most of them are in the text. Whereas if we read a one-sentence story by Lydia Davis, “Samuel Johnson is indignant that Scotland has so few trees,” we have to fill in ^a lot of details on our own. (By the way, her story isn’t really her writing; it is a statement made by James Boswell that she’s displayed as a story—like dada-ish “found” art. It’s a found story.)

To localize this theory, of sorts, we could return to the story that won’t rest with me: ^Theft. That story requires ^a lot of work brought to the table by a reader. In order to make sense of that story, there is work to be done.

Now, this is not to say that novels ^don’t require work from a reader. They do. It’s just that it’s a different kind of work—maybe even a voluntary work. In books worth reading, there is always something past the surface events. So in a novel worth reading, there is work to be done by a reader—but it’s not the same as basic work to be done to come to ^any understanding of the text.

In my Theatre History course right now, we are on absurdism. We are talking about Beckett right now—we just read and watched ^Play. And especially with absurdism, the work is all reader’s/viewers. Something is presented (in this case, three people in urns speaking quickly and in mostly monotone, there is repetition, there is no ^easy conflict or conclusion…) and the reader of this “text” is left to sort it all out.

So that’s getting off-topic, but basically, I think there is something to be said for what the reader is asked to bring to the table. That may help us to differentiate the short story from the novel. This actually touches on the idea of resolution vs. epiphany. The short story states, “this thing happened to end in a change,” and the novel goes on to explain what resulted because of that change.