After Epiphany: American Stories in the Postmodern Age

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: dimension of has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. (Italo Calvino) To what, then, could have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that possibility of great ones was historically precluded. (Aldo Rossi) To talk about short stories as small is to risk a return to that lowest of common denominators: a short is a that is short. want to begin there, nevertheless, by positing some connections between petits recits, circumstantiated struggles, perishing trajectories of love and thought--the materials and occasions of postmodern culture--and some American stories of our time. In these stories, small figures large. It disfigures teleology, displaces universal truths and eternal verities, and eventually epiphany itself, that point of contact with meaning or wholeness, which has stood so long center of our understanding of genre. To make such a claim, to suggest that contemporary stories do not inevitably advance toward and can no longer be read in terms of epiphany, is to challenge short-story theory point of greatest consensus. epiphany is, even among critics of widely divergent opinion on other matters, almost a given. stories work towards a single moment of revelation . . . an epiphany, or instant of radiant insight, Valerie Shaw observes in her volume on story. Suddenly fundamental secret of is made accessible and ordinary circumstances are transfused with significance (193). In his widely cited essay on The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction, Charles E. May writes: The short attempts to be authentic to immaterial of inner of self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal (329). Mary Rohrberger suggests, likewise, that is metaphysical in its orientation and that it represents the author's probing of nature of real. As in metaphysical view, she writes, reality lies beyond ordinary of appearances, so in short story, meaning lies beneath surface of narrative. framework of narrative embodies symbols which function to question of appearances and to point to a beyond facts of extensional world (Short 81). And in his very recent essay on genre, Allan H. Pasco concludes that movement of is toward the essential truth or idea or image which rises above time (420). Such views essentialize, would suggest, what is arguably modern. I shall call modern, Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, the art which devotes its 'little technical expertise' . . . to present fact that unpresentable exists. To make that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible (78). Shaw's concluding description of short as a genre is strikingly similar to Lyotard's account of modern. The short story's success, she writes, often lies in conveying a sense of unwritten, or even unwriteable things (264). Rohrberger, too, finds at very base of short story unpresentable, the that that is unsaid but somehow manages to be said (Between 43). This assimilation of modernist epistemology into definitions of genre is doubly problematic for critic of contemporary story, in which essentialist notions have given way and metanarratives--whether of cosmic truth, self-knowledge, or, in Eudora Welty's words, emotions which are eternally same in of us (108)--are increasingly met with what Lyotard terms incredulity (xxiv). Thomas M. Leitch is only critic to date who has vigorously challenged claim that all short stories proceed to a revelation that establishes a teleology, a retrospective sense of design (131). …