In all of the one thousand or so classic short stories I have surveyed, I have found only one unambiguous exception to the “law” of exoticism: in contrast to the other short story writers, Chekhov used his readers as characters in many stories later in his career, from Dama s sobachkoi (Lady with Lapdog) to Strakh (Fear) or Nevest’ (The Bride). These are what we might call “transition stories” between the classic and modern form (which we will examine in detail in Part III). There are, in addition, two more exceptions, but here again these are exceptions that prove rather than challenge the rule.
The first is that of the narrators of frame-stories. Some stories, like James’s The Turn of the Screw, follow a structure inherited from Giovanni Boccaccio: we are first introduced to a narrator who then proceeds to tell us a story within the story. This narrator generally belongs to the same world as the reader. He sets the mood before the real story unfolds. This narrator is one of a small group (hunters, guests in a country house, etc), who gently brings his readers into the warm intimacy of the circle around the fire or the relaxed after-dinner atmosphere of a group of friends. He will then let
44 This may not be a feature only of nineteenth-century short stories. Even if authors generally moved away from the exotic in the twentieth century, readers in a few countries at least retained their former taste for exotic short stories. It has become common in France to complain of the public’s disaffection for the short story. But on closer examination, this disaffection only concerns French texts; foreign short stories — from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Jorge Luis Borges to Katherine Mansfield — are widely read. French short story writers today generally write about the immediate and topical;
the public would seem to prefer, as in earlier times, stories about the other side of the world.
6. Exoticism in the Classic Short Story 99 us hear the story as he heard it: because he has created a sense of familiarity, we are ready to enter the world of the unusual. As we shall see in regard to travelogues in the next chapter, this narrator is the intermediary who puts the reader in contact with a foreign world.
The second exception in our corpus involves the few stories, published in the society newspapers, in which Verga and Maupassant talk about high society. First we should note that, in these stories, the attitude towards the characters is very different from the attitude towards workers or peasants. Members of the upper class are not shown to have certain types of behaviour that define them as a social group. The heroes are frenzied hunters, busybodies, coquettes, adulterous women who cling desperately to their lover: they are seen as unique individuals, and it is not likely that the reader will identify with them. He will not feel challenged by the story’s ridiculing of them, and neither will their abusive or ridiculous behaviour compromise the upper class as a whole.
These types of stories are very similar to anecdote, and the reader’s involvement in them is quite different from the stories discussed earlier in this chapter. Like the serialised novel or the sensational news items, anecdote is a journalistic genre of its own: all the newspapers of the time published anecdotes, including those of good repute. These short stories are on the border of that genre, of the kind that is told at a dinner party:
the “tall tale”. The tension they are built upon usually relies on paradox, with an end which brings an unexpected answer, one that introduces narrative elements in an unusual combination, or at least is perceived that way. Examples include Maupassant’s La Bûche (The Log), Le Gâteau (The Cake), Le Verrou (The Lock), Mon oncle Sosthène (My Uncle Sosthenes), Sauvée (Saved); and Verga’s Giuramenti di marinaio (Sailor’s Oaths), Carmen and Commedia da salotto (Drawing-room Comedy). These “high society” short stories are usually published in men’s magazines like Gil Blas, and are close relatives of the misogynist after-dinner tale. Here, too, the reader’s identification with the character is unlikely. Distance is not brought by the difference in social status, but in the amusement or irony with which the subject is treated.45
45 This is also the case in many of James’s stories, where the characters are admittedly of the same social circle as the author, but thrown by the author into eccentric, quasi-fantastic stories (The Private Life, Fordham Castle, Broken Wings). I will discuss this further in Chapter Eight.
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Despite these few exceptions, the overwhelming fact about the publication of short stories in newspapers at the turn of the century was that the characters in these stories could not overlap with their readers.
Tales of peasants and workers appeared in fashionable periodicals that were available to neither of these groups; short stories about the provinces appeared in the newspapers of the capitals. There is always distance, and this distance was largely a result of the commercial constraints of the press.
7. Short Stories and the Travelogue
At the beginning of their careers, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant wrote as many travelogues as they did short stories. The travelogue — by which I mean a “factual” article describing a journey to a foreign place — became another important item in the newspapers of the late nineteenth century. We shall see in this chapter that short stories of that time shared many characteristics with the travelogue, and that this had a direct and important bearing on the short story as a genre. Authors in general — and these two authors in particular — very often wrote travelogues and short stories at the same time, and set them in the same countries. They also sometimes published them both in the same periodicals.1 In the stories as in the travelogues, the characterisation of the foreign world emphasised the differences with the readers’ world.
Characteristically the writer of a travelogue plays the role of intermediary. He belongs to the same world as the reader, and, during his
1 For example James’s first published items were chronicles of a journey within the United States. Then he went to Europe and returned with his first short stories. From then on, and for several years, he published alternately and sometimes for the same periodical, travelogues and short stories in which the action takes place in the same country. In the case of Maupassant, there is a series of short stories set in North Africa, Afrique (The Africans), Au soleil (In the Sun), La Vie errante (The Life of Wandering) and several texts about the south of France and Corsica, published together with travelogues about the same places. Chekhov’s scientific description of a Sakhalin penal colony was in the same way accompanied by the story V Ssylke (In Exile) published after his trip to Sakhalin.
© Florence Goyet, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0039.07
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stays abroad, he gathers knowledge and impressions of a foreign country that he will share with them. The important point is that he perceives the foreigner with the eye of his own civilization; ideally he is an “expert” of that country, but one who never forgets his origins. In this way, he can describe the foreigner in terms that the people at home understand. Almost always this involved the author adopting a sharply critical and, as we shall see, superior tone.
For both authors — Maupassant and James — there is a striking continuity between their travelogues and short stories: in the tales set in exotic countries we shall find descriptions, judgements and explanations that would not be out of place in the corresponding travelogues. We can also find identical sentences in both the “factual” chronicle and the short story.2 Sometimes a text begins as a travelogue and then goes on to narrate a story: in Maupassant’s Un bandit corse (The Corsican Bandit), for instance, the initial descriptions are like a travelogue, and then the transition is made with the request, “‘Tell me about your bandits’”, which introduces the anecdote.3 The exact nature of the text is not always clear, something which has proved difficult for editors. Louis Forestier, for example, included in the body of his edition of Maupassant’s short stories many texts that verged on the travelogue, but then relegates to his appendix one text which has all the characteristics of a short story even though it describes effusively the nature of Switzerland.4 This story is in the form of a letter written by the author to someone staying in Paris — a classic device of the travelogue — in which descriptions of the countryside and the customs are presented as if the author were writing familiarly to the reader.