The 20th century

In the first half of the 20th century the appeal of the short story continued to grow. Literally hundreds of writers—including, as it seems, nearly every major dramatist, poet, and novelist—published thousands of excellent stories. William Faulkner suggested that writers often try their hand at poetry, find it too difficult, go on to the next most demanding form, the short story, fail at that, and only then settle for the novel. In the 20th century Germany, France, Russia, and the U.S. lost what had once appeared to be their exclusive domination of the form. Innovative and commanding writers emerged in places that had previously exerted little influence on the genre: Sicily, for example, produced Luigi Pirandello; Prague, Franz Kafka; Japan, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke; Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges. Literary journals with international circulation, such as Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review, Scribner’s Magazine, and Harriet Weaver’s Egoist, provided a steady and prime exposure for young writers.

As the familiarity with it increased, the short story form itself became more varied and complex. The fundamental means of structuring a story underwent a significant change. The overwhelming or unique event that usually informed the 19th-century story fell out of favour with the storywriter of the early 20th century, who grew more interested in subtle actions and unspectacular events. Sherwood Anderson, one of the most influential U.S. writers of the early 20th century, observed that the common belief in his day was that stories had to be built around a plot, a notion that, in Anderson’s opinion, appeared to poison all storytelling. His own aim was to achieve form, not plot, although form was more elusive and difficult. The record of the short story in the 20th century is dominated by this increased sensitivity to—and experimentation with—form. Although the popular writers of the century (like O. Henry in the U.S. and Paul Morand in France) may have continued to structure stories according to plot, the greater artists turned elsewhere for structure, frequently eliciting the response from cursory readers that “nothing happens in these stories.” Narratives like Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933) may seem to have no structure at all, so little physical action develops; but stories of this kind are actually structured around a psychological, rather than physical, conflict. In several of Hemingway’s stories (as in many by D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and others), physical action and event are unimportant except insofar as the actions reveal the psychological underpinnings of the story. Stories came to be structured, also, in accordance with an underlying archetypal model: the specific plot and characters are important insofar as they allude to a traditional plot or figure, or to patterns that have recurred with wide implications in the history of mankind. Katherine Anne Porter’s “Flowering Judas” (1930), for example, echoes and ironically inverts the traditional Christian legend. Still other stories are formed by means of motif, usually a thematic repetition of an image or detail that represents the dominant idea of the story. “The Dead,” the final story in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), builds from a casual mention of death and snow early in the story to a culminating paragraph that links them in a profound vision. Seldom, of course, is the specific structure of one story appropriate for a different story. Faulkner, for example, used the traditional pattern of the knightly quest (in an ironic way) for his story “Was,” but for “Barn Burning” he relied on a psychologically organic form to reveal the story of young Sarty Snopes.

No single form provided the 20th-century writer with the answer to structural problems. As the primary structuring agent, spectacular and suspenseful action was rather universally rejected around midcentury since motion pictures and television could present it much more vividly. As the periodicals that had supplied escapist stories to mass audiences declined, the short story became the favoured form of a smaller but intellectually more demanding readership. Borges, for example, attracted an international following with his Ficciones, stories that involved the reader in dazzling displays of erudition and imagination, unlike anything previously encountered in the genre. Similarly, the American Donald Barthelme’s composition consisted of bits and pieces of, e.g., television commercials, political speeches, literary allusions, eavesdropped conversations, graphic symbols, dialogue from Hollywood movies—all interspersed with his own original prose in a manner that defied easy comprehension and yet compelled the full attention of the reader. The short story also lent itself to the rhetoric of student protest in the 1960s and was found in a bewildering variety of mixed-media forms in the “underground” press that publicized this life style throughout the world. In his deep concern with such a fundamental matter as form, the 20th-century writer unwittingly affirmed the maturation and popularity of the genre; only a secure and valued (not to mention flexible) genre could withstand and, moreover, encourage such experimentation.