The Long Reach of Classic Short Fiction

‘The Storytellers; Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction‘By Michael GorraThe University of Chicago Press, 344 pagesHow lovely and rare is Michael Gorra’s “The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction,” an academic book that belies the genre in being unassuming in its scholarly byways and eminently readable. No impenetrable prose or ideological grudgery to be suffered here, no post-modernist flim-flam. Instead, we encounter the musings of a recently retired professor at Smith College and an essayist whose work has been published in, among other journals, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.Mr. Gorra enjoys a good story, its inner mechanics and cultural reverberations. He points to the genre in its earliest forms — Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” for example — and is careful to distinguish the topic at hand from similar efforts by Voltaire and Diderot: “They write fictions, but they don’t tell stories. Or rather their stories are vehicles for intellectual speculation above all, in which they make their characters serve their arguments.” What, then, in Mr. Gorra’s estimation constitutes a short story as we have come to know it? He begins with the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his not-quite-a-novel, “Novelle.” Goethe relates the comings-and-goings of a royal couple, a young flautist, and an escaped tiger and lion on the loose in the hills of an unnamed European township. He went on to peg the tale as “a peculiar and as yet unheard-of event.” At which the professor picks up and runs with Goethe’s ball, writing that a short story “should tell us of something at once real and profoundly strange, undreamed of in our everyday lives . . . lives [that] lie outside the sweep of historicized narrative on which the classic novel depends.”Outside the sweep of not only history, but reality. A good amount of time is dedicated to E.T.A. Hoffmann, a figure who was in “his own period called a ‘man of parts,’ and maybe there were too many of them.” Hoffmann was a composer, painter, writer, theatrical director, lawyer, judge, and inveterate tippler. He was also taken with “the mingling of sanity and madness, the porous membrane between our dreams and our waking existence.” A link is divined between Hoffmann and Sigmund Freud — the good doctor worried that his case studies read too much like fantasies — as well as Pushkin, Balzac and Emily Brontë.Mr. Gorra loves the texture of reading and is able to articulate that love into sentences of enviable clarity and nuance. Speaking to Balzac’s fluidity of narrative, the author notes how “each spoken sentence seems to make the world change, each word is answered with a gesture or a glance, and no matter how many secrets are skillfully betrayed no one sees in them ‘a book to be written.'” Charles W. Chesnutt “finds his own purpose in representing the eloquence of those who cannot read or write themselves.” Guy de Maupassant “can make a story out of nothing at all. Or rather, he suggests, our every action has a story behind it, if we only look closely.”Not all is commendation. In writing about Edgar Allan Poe, Mr. Gorra avers that “it’s hard now to take much of Poe’s fiction seriously. His narrative can be unbearably overwrought, a purple Gothicked American dream of some purely notional Europe.” At which point, Poe is cast as a victim of posthumous fame, of stories that have been anthologized one too many times and, though it’s not mentioned by Mr. Gorra, adapted, often in a piecemeal manner, for movies and television. “Nobody forgets his stories . . . yet once you know what’s coming, there’s not a lot to them.” Any reader who has revisited the doomed sage of Baltimore as an adult knows what Mr. Gorra is talking about.‘The Storytellers’ by Michael Gorra. University of Chicago PressBy the time Mr. Gorra arrives at the final chapter, “The Storyteller,” he admits to having bitten off more than he could chew, ruing the exclusion of Hans Christian-Andersen, Stephen Crane, Arthur Schnitzler, and others. Instead he goes out on 1934’s “Seven Gothic Tales,” a compendium of stories by Danish author Karen Blixen, known, more famously, as “Isak Dinesen.” A conscious throwback to the 19th-century, Dinesen’s book is a a eulogy for a world displaced by modernism: “Dinesen revives all the leisurely enthralling stagecraft of an earlier age, all the things that after Chekhov the writers of her own time were learning to do without.”Who cares if Mr. Gorra use words like “gallimaufry” with a straight face? “The Storytellers” is a book that will prompt readers to revisit once-read tales and seek out those that have never been encountered. What a boon it is to have it on the shelf.

The Long Reach of Classic Short Fiction

The Long Reach of Classic Short Fiction

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