Reluctantly contra Traylen

A defence of the short story which, in general, I also hate

Yeats ploughing his way into the literary canon while Margot Ruddock drowns

The Republic of Letters recently published an article by Philip Traylen on the short story which, to put it mildly, was the cause of some controversy. Please read it; it’s hilarious. Below is my belated response…

At the outset I should make it clear that I agree with everything Philip says about the modern short story and was exhilarated to see this horrible thing anatomised so clinically. We all owe him a debt of gratitude. A wise old man once said that the aim of rhetoric is to make language into something ‘kinetic’. In this sense, it was a virtuoso rhetorical performance which ripped clean through its target.

Despite this, I have to argue contra Traylen that while he has given us the truth and nothing but the truth, this is not the same as the whole truth. You need the whole truth to say that something should never have existed in the first place. As with miracles, so with art, all I have to do is find one or two indisputable cases to dispel the unbeliever. I feel happier disputing with Philip on these terms, even if I have to assume the role of pedantic quibbler.

First a few comments on the ‘dusting-and-noticing’ aesthetic, which is the name that Philip gives to our reigning literary banalities. If you have been to a book festival in the last twenty years you’ll know exactly what he’s talking about, and the ‘quasi-political’ apologias for such bad writing will also be familiar too. It has been said that Waiting for Godot is a play in which nothing happens, twice. Of these purpose-built prize-winners one would hesitate to say that nothing happens in them even once. The ‘overall goal’ of writing a story like this, apart from winning prizes, is perfectly summarised thus:

…[to] ‘break out of Weberian disenchantment by paying a bit more attention to things.’ An enormous aesthetic burden is therefore placed on ‘perceiving mundane objects in a new light.’ In practice, these objects do nothing but throw the light back (‘luminosity’), and the story freights itself into emptiness.

Quite so, but there is a venerable literary tradition that answers to this same description which includes writers like Proust and Wordsworth, who rightly occupy the upper levels of our literary Paradiso. Indeed, I would submit - and please read this in the voice of Slavoj Zizek - I would submit that the whole noticing-and-paying-attention-to-things mode is just a degenerate form of Proustian ‘moments bienheureux’ or ‘moments privilégiés’. Par example:

I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves' in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and scattered by the first breath of wind.

There is much noticing and paying attention to things in this passage, and at least one mundane object perceived in a new light, but the total effect is of a massive aesthetic burden handled with consummate technical bravura. You could also think of contemporary short stories as abortive attempts to ‘prosify’ the ‘spots of time’ episodes in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, in which the poet relates how otherwise mundane scenes can become fixated in the mind with ‘distinct pre-eminence’ by a special ‘renovating virtue’ that attaches to them. One of the reasons we do not have the same sense of being ‘freighted into emptiness’ when we read Proust or Wordsworth is that their ‘luminous moments’ are part of a network of such moments, and by folding this network on itself in unexpected ways they convey to us the pathos of human contingency. It is difficult to do this in the short story because of its smallness, but it can be done, indeed sometimes smallness has its own peculiar potency. Janacek does it musically in under a minute in his ‘Reminiscence’:

But the real difference between the true Proustian style and the degenerate Proustianising of the modern short story is that Proust does his ‘noticing’ and ‘paying a bit more attention’ not only at the level of experience but also at the level of language. He is not a ‘neuroscientist’ as one truly awful book puts it, he is a writer, which is to say he is someone for whom ‘experience’ and ‘language’ are never wholly separable. This is obviously true of Wordsworth as well, whose late work did finally collapse under its ‘enormous aesthetic burden’ as his ability to keep language alive with a fresh idiom failed him.

In a memorable passage from Philip’s article he quotes, with his torturer's delight, a section ‘selected at random’ (surely not) from The Best American Short Stories 2020. The sentences appear to have been ‘run through by a kind of word-plough’ resulting in prose that ‘hangs on truncated metaphors whose only function is ‘being metaphors’’. This is all excellently put and Philip’s own words exemplify the opposite tendency to the sort of distracted language he rightly holds up for our critical scrutiny. By contrast, consider the following two paragraphs, from the end of Joyce’s The Dead, which may be the best short story ever written:

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The longer the quotation the more exposed I am to accusations of hiding behind Joyce’s genius; but that is what I am doing, much in the way that Joyce would hide behind Hemmingway’s brawn when the two got caught up in a bar fight. Here Joyce’s language is just as much ‘run through’ by a ‘word-plough’ as the beginning of ‘Godmother Tea’, but the plough in question is the one that Yeats spoke of in his letter to Margot Ruddock when he finally grew tired of his girlfriend’s atrocious verse:

‘... you take the easiest course - leave out the rhymes or choose the most hackneyed rhymes, because - damn you - you are lazy. Leave off verse for a time. When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second-hand - there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface - difficulty is our plough.

Yours affectionately,

W B Yeats’

Incidentally, if Ruddock were alive today she would almost certainly be writing collections of short stories and winning Man Booker Prizes.

Setting that aside, form, including the short prose narrative, is one of the ‘difficulties’ that forces you down below the surface, below both your ‘second-hand’ thoughts and the literary-semantic detritus of our everyday language. Joyce was almost always at this level, and his own aesthetic collapse came from his inability to stop going down until he hit the pseudo-poem sentences of Finnegans Wake.

When I said earlier that the modern short story is a ‘degenerate form of Proustian moments bienheureux’ I meant that it was degenerate in the sense of (a) ‘having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline’ but lurking behind it was also sense (b) ‘a limiting case in which a class of object changes its nature so as to belong to another’. The original sin of the modern writer is to treat the short story as a degenerate form of the novel. The reason to write a short story is because in the short story prose is under extreme pressure, and interesting things happen to language in those conditions, as Joyce shows.

So there’s one miracle from Joyce; the other miracle is Jorge Luis Borges, both the man himself and the work. Here I will just deliver my own Traylenism and ask - is there anything more absurd than the idea of a Borgesian novel? Indeed, the Borgesian short story is a sort of anti-novel, which also sometimes happens to take place in gardens, only they are gardens of forking paths in which we awake from the nightmare of history into a terrifying Molinism.

Oh there’s also Flannery O’Connor - she would have had that cat bagged and drowned within three pages.