ENGL 4310

Last class we had touched on how regional culture affects writing. I have all the good ol’ Dover Thrift Editions “Great (insert name of country here) Short Stories” books, and of course, all of them have their notes at the beginning. While most of the other books had notes about the actual stories within the collection the Irish book had this to say:

Frank O’Connor, one of the most important practitioners of the Irish short story
as well as one of the genre’s most profound critics, has suggested that short
stories thrive under particular social conditions—circumstances very different
from those that produce novels:

“The novel by its very nature
presupposes a group, a social system that can absorb the lonely figure.
The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no
longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were,
by his own inner light.”

Ireland in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, with its rural population and relatively fragmented
cultural life, lent itself to short-story writing. The country’s
complicated relationship with England and the English Language added to the
estrangement that fueled this literature. O’Connor maintains that Irish
intellectuals, unlike their American and European counterparts, never believed
that organized society could function beneficially for all its members and they
thus assumed a permanent role outside of the community. The short story’s
form, with its limited point of view and its plot of ten compromising a single
event, correspond to their social sentiments.

Other critics
propose more fundamental sources for Ireland’s short-story tradition. Most
often cited is the country’s rich national culture of oral storytelling.
Practiced over centuries, the storyteller’s art served to transmit history and
genealogy between generations. Another scholar has idiosyncratically
suggested that the Irish have a particular taste for art on a small scale,
mentioning that they have been called “a nation of miniaturists in perfection of
the arts.” He cites the Tara brooch, the Ardagh chalice, the memorable
tune, the exquisite oratory, and, in literature, the lyric poem, the one act
play, and of course, the short story, as examples.

Even though this is about Ireland, I thought some of the points that introduction brings up about why people write the short story were interesting. We had talked in class about how an author’s region can affect the plot and characters of their story, but not necessarily how it might alter the structure. Authors can be drawn to a short story over a novel because the structure of a short story itself is a commentary on their political or emotional environment. Certainly, we can see this when we consider that Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter were sick much of their life and that affected how much they could write. But it can also be a cultural thing to produce a certain style of work. Even before I had read any O’Connor or Porter I had associated short stories with the South, though to be honest, I don’t know where I get that notion from.

We had also talked about if you can really write about a particular region until you have left it. I am not sure if you can. Dorothy couldn’t appreciate Kansas until her adventures in Oz. I couldn’t recognize the fast-pace lifestyle of Vegas for what it was until I moved to a place where things actually close down. Perhaps in the same way that you cannot understand that you have quirk X until someone tells you about it, it takes leaving your region to gain a new understanding of it.