The Long and the Short of It

I have chosen a title with a familiar ring to it not merely out of facility and because length perhaps most significant feature in short story definitions but also in order to repeat (in part) title (or some segment) of earlier discussions of short story. I am thinking of Herbert Gold's Novel and Story: Long and Short of It, for example; of Louise Pratt's interesting Short Story: The Long and Short of It; and of Susan Lohafer who, in her splendid Coming to Terms with Short Story, considers the long and short of prose (13). Besides, my repetitious title emblematic of repetitions found in a good number of essays on topic, consisting of comparisons between short fiction and novel, for instance; of complaints about unjust lack of regard for even great exemplars of former in comparison with a concentration on long fiction, poetry, or drama; of laments (which sound increasingly less persuasive) on paucity of serious or theoretical criticism devoted to short story; of claims of latter's resistance to (illuminating) definitions (similar claims can, of course, be made about service encounter, conversation, essay, or even novel); and of attempts to define it, nonetheless, in terms of at least some of features I will use for my own definition (see, among others Clare Hanson, Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, Charles E. May, Allan Pasco, and Valerie Shaw). In order to belong to class of short stories, a text must be short: not long (War and Peace, say, Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past), not medium (The Stranger, Strait Is Gate), and not, as Poe himself pointed out, very short. Undue brevity, Poe noted, is just as exceptionable |in short: story~ as in poem, where it degenerates into epigrammatism and fails to produce intense and enduring impression (47-48). A minimal story like Mary was very happy, then she lost a lot of money, and she became very sad does not quite a short story make; neither does anecdote by Enrique Anderson Imbert called Taboo, which uses just thirty-one words in original Spanish version;(1) and, more generally, neither does any text that can be read in less time than it takes to sit down. Furthermore, and regardless of its degree of narrativity (regardless of how narrative it is), text must satisfy not simply requirements of narrativehood (represent one or more events) but requirements of storyhood (represent a series of situations and events involving anthropomorphic beings such that at least one nonlinguistically bound transformational relation obtains between an earlier situation and a later one). At least some of these situations and events must be fictional (they have never had any empirical existence: their meaning and force depend on a feigned context). At any rate, their historical veracity, their factual truth, not relevant to their significance. The text must also be written and it must be written in prose (as opposed to verse rather than to poetry). It must be literary; offered for display; intended or taken to be beautiful, pleasing, aesthetically affecting (I stress, in passing, that just as not every story a fiction and vice versa, not every fiction literary: think of grammatical examples or philosophical suppositions). Finally, text must be autonomous. It must not (primarily) depend for its import on another text in which it embedded or with which it conjoined or alternating and it must not have as its (primary) purpose illumination of such a text. Whatever its ultimate worth, this relatively standard definition would allow us to distinguish short-story genre from a multiplicity of other (more-or-less related) genres: tragedy, essay, sonnet, but also verse narratives, so-called natural narratives, myths, jokes, anecdotes, or news stories, novels, short novels, annals, long stories, scientific reports, plot summaries, and so on and so forth. …