They Muscle Their Way: Short stories vs Novels
I've been reading this year's (2019) collection of the O. Henry prize stories, but I began by reading the essays at the back of the book by the jurors on their favorites. They're short essays, but interesting, particularly Lynn Feeds. She begins by saying she has "read any number of metaphors for the difference between novels and short stories. The one [she favors] concerns plum pudding. If the novel is the whole pudding, the theory goes, then the short story is the piece with the coin in it."
There seems to be as many metaphors for this difference as there are people who actually think (and write about) about it. This one, I disagree with, although I, admittedly, haven't heard it before and this brief paragraph is all she gives as context. I disagree in that I do not believe a story (which I use interchangeably with "short story") is simply a distilled version of a novel. Whereas you may read 200 hundred pages of a novel before getting the coin, a story should present in 40 pages or less, that type of thing. I believe stories and novels are working at doing different things all together. While their medium is prose, there are few similarities apart from that.
Of course their themes and tropes and general ideas may be the same. A novelist may be investigating loneliness, say, and many stories do the same; or a story might wrestle with questions of being a "good human," and you might say nearly every novel asks the same questions.
What I mean is the two genres develop these themes, or ask these questions, in wildly different ways.
I once wrote an essay in which I tried to say novels were like paintings, and stories were like sculptures, a bad metaphor to be sure, but one I think makes my point, if unclearly. I wrote that novels put everything forth for the reader to consume. That is: the whole thing is there. If a novel ends without "tying up the loose ends," the reader is likely to be unsatisfied. Whereas a story doesn't need to have everything tied up nicely at the end to be satisfactory. Indeed, part of the beauty of stories, is that they--the good ones--carry on past the final period. That is: they force the reader finish the thing on its own. A painting, you can see all at once--though I know this isn't true technically, but a sculpture takes some walking around to see it all at once. In the essay, I said a novel invites you inside of it; you enter the novel and walk around until the end, and then you leave (I remember referencing how we often "miss" the world of certain novels, or even characters, and that I've yet to hear anyone speak of stories in this manner). Stories, on the other hand, make room for themselves in your mind. You do not enter a story, but it muscles its way into your head space.
Perhaps that doesn't make sense to anyone but myself. The essay received a poor mark, and the professor, after asking me to his office to discuss it, seemed to take issue with most of it. He seemed to think I was claiming stories are "harder" to read than novels, that story writers are asking their reader to "work more" to get to the coin, as it were, than novelists are. He then offered some stellar examples of novels that require a ton of mental energy to work through (Finnegan's Wake was one), as well as some stories that were "just" stories, where the point was evident on the first read through and wasn't worth much as far as any sort of artistic aesthetic.
My point was only (and is still) that novels and stories are asking their readers to work in different ways ( a point I have no doubt my professor would agree with).
When reading Harry Potter, for instance (but I think it's true of most novels), one enters the novel. There are many mysteries, but we know that it's mysterious, the characters know it's mysterious. Some characters (Dumbledore) may not say exactly what they mean, or may leave important details out of a conversation, but we as readers know he's doing so; the other characters are usually suspicious of the character doing so, etc. And inevitably, importantly for my argument, those mysteries are solved by the end of the book. We know what the character has left out, and usually why they chose to leave it out.
Stories don't reveal these things. In Tobias Wolff's, "A Bullet in the Brain," takes three and a half pages to tell of one character in a bank while it's being robbed. He then mocks the burglars to their face enough to provoke one of them to shoot him in the head. Wolff reveals a shocking amount of information about the protagonist in the three pages, but nothing is said of why Anders (the main character) acts the way he does, if he is suicidal and wants to die, or if he's just a pompous individual, mocking for the sake of mocking. We don't get to learn why the thieves are thieving (though this may not be important) or what happens after Anders is shot, what happens to the others in the bank, etc.
The point of the story is not to tell a clean Aristotelian story--with a clear beginning, middle, and end--as most novels do, but, as I believe most stories are wont to do, is simply forcing the reader to ask itself Why. Why, but then also how? "Why does this character act in this way?" almost always, at least for me, leads to how would I have acted. Bullet is a beautiful story (one of my all-time favourites) in its execution and its ability to show you a nearly whole character in such a short amount of time. The bullet hitting Anders' brain reveals a clear memory from childhood, but never tells you why that's what "flashed before his eyes" before death, yet immediately seems to force you to wonder what memory you would have had in the same situation. It ends when it ends, but it is impossible for you, as the reader, to stop there. You must imagine what happens next, or even what had happened prior to. It continues past the last coma into your imagination in a way novels can't (and don't seem to want) to do.
This particular story, for instance, is so short, but it has taken up so much space in my brain. I have read it at least a dozen times. When I think of Harry Potter, or any novel, it is a place I go to in my brain, but stories--at least the good ones--have carved out their own spaces; I never know when I'm going to bump into them.
I imagine you have no clearer understanding of what I think the difference between novels and stories is after reading this, but I'm planning to try to elaborate in this space as I continue reading and thinking about stories. My goal this year is to read a new (or at least different) story every day, and then to write about them intermittently here.
I hope you'll join me.
There seems to be as many metaphors for this difference as there are people who actually think (and write about) about it. This one, I disagree with, although I, admittedly, haven't heard it before and this brief paragraph is all she gives as context. I disagree in that I do not believe a story (which I use interchangeably with "short story") is simply a distilled version of a novel. Whereas you may read 200 hundred pages of a novel before getting the coin, a story should present in 40 pages or less, that type of thing. I believe stories and novels are working at doing different things all together. While their medium is prose, there are few similarities apart from that.
Of course their themes and tropes and general ideas may be the same. A novelist may be investigating loneliness, say, and many stories do the same; or a story might wrestle with questions of being a "good human," and you might say nearly every novel asks the same questions.
What I mean is the two genres develop these themes, or ask these questions, in wildly different ways.
I once wrote an essay in which I tried to say novels were like paintings, and stories were like sculptures, a bad metaphor to be sure, but one I think makes my point, if unclearly. I wrote that novels put everything forth for the reader to consume. That is: the whole thing is there. If a novel ends without "tying up the loose ends," the reader is likely to be unsatisfied. Whereas a story doesn't need to have everything tied up nicely at the end to be satisfactory. Indeed, part of the beauty of stories, is that they--the good ones--carry on past the final period. That is: they force the reader finish the thing on its own. A painting, you can see all at once--though I know this isn't true technically, but a sculpture takes some walking around to see it all at once. In the essay, I said a novel invites you inside of it; you enter the novel and walk around until the end, and then you leave (I remember referencing how we often "miss" the world of certain novels, or even characters, and that I've yet to hear anyone speak of stories in this manner). Stories, on the other hand, make room for themselves in your mind. You do not enter a story, but it muscles its way into your head space.
Perhaps that doesn't make sense to anyone but myself. The essay received a poor mark, and the professor, after asking me to his office to discuss it, seemed to take issue with most of it. He seemed to think I was claiming stories are "harder" to read than novels, that story writers are asking their reader to "work more" to get to the coin, as it were, than novelists are. He then offered some stellar examples of novels that require a ton of mental energy to work through (Finnegan's Wake was one), as well as some stories that were "just" stories, where the point was evident on the first read through and wasn't worth much as far as any sort of artistic aesthetic.
My point was only (and is still) that novels and stories are asking their readers to work in different ways ( a point I have no doubt my professor would agree with).
When reading Harry Potter, for instance (but I think it's true of most novels), one enters the novel. There are many mysteries, but we know that it's mysterious, the characters know it's mysterious. Some characters (Dumbledore) may not say exactly what they mean, or may leave important details out of a conversation, but we as readers know he's doing so; the other characters are usually suspicious of the character doing so, etc. And inevitably, importantly for my argument, those mysteries are solved by the end of the book. We know what the character has left out, and usually why they chose to leave it out.
Stories don't reveal these things. In Tobias Wolff's, "A Bullet in the Brain," takes three and a half pages to tell of one character in a bank while it's being robbed. He then mocks the burglars to their face enough to provoke one of them to shoot him in the head. Wolff reveals a shocking amount of information about the protagonist in the three pages, but nothing is said of why Anders (the main character) acts the way he does, if he is suicidal and wants to die, or if he's just a pompous individual, mocking for the sake of mocking. We don't get to learn why the thieves are thieving (though this may not be important) or what happens after Anders is shot, what happens to the others in the bank, etc.
The point of the story is not to tell a clean Aristotelian story--with a clear beginning, middle, and end--as most novels do, but, as I believe most stories are wont to do, is simply forcing the reader to ask itself Why. Why, but then also how? "Why does this character act in this way?" almost always, at least for me, leads to how would I have acted. Bullet is a beautiful story (one of my all-time favourites) in its execution and its ability to show you a nearly whole character in such a short amount of time. The bullet hitting Anders' brain reveals a clear memory from childhood, but never tells you why that's what "flashed before his eyes" before death, yet immediately seems to force you to wonder what memory you would have had in the same situation. It ends when it ends, but it is impossible for you, as the reader, to stop there. You must imagine what happens next, or even what had happened prior to. It continues past the last coma into your imagination in a way novels can't (and don't seem to want) to do.
This particular story, for instance, is so short, but it has taken up so much space in my brain. I have read it at least a dozen times. When I think of Harry Potter, or any novel, it is a place I go to in my brain, but stories--at least the good ones--have carved out their own spaces; I never know when I'm going to bump into them.
I imagine you have no clearer understanding of what I think the difference between novels and stories is after reading this, but I'm planning to try to elaborate in this space as I continue reading and thinking about stories. My goal this year is to read a new (or at least different) story every day, and then to write about them intermittently here.
I hope you'll join me.
Comments
Post a Comment