Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism | Page 8

probably the best way of making the short
story a thoroughly efficient tool for the presentation of modern life.
And there lies, I believe, the whole trouble. The short story, its course
plotted and its form prescribed, has become too efficient. Now
efficiency is all that we ask of a railroad, efficiency is half at least of
what we ask of journalism; but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps
the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature.
In order to make the short story efficient, the dialogue, the setting, the
plot, the character development, have been squeezed and whittled and
moulded until the means of telling the story fit the ends of the
story-telling as neatly as hook fits eye. As one writer on how to
manufacture short stories tells us in discussing character development,
the aspirant must--
"Eliminate every trait or deed which does not help peculiarly to make
the character's part in the particular story either intelligible or open to
such sympathy as it merits;
"Paint in only the 'high lights,' that is...never qualify or elaborate a trait
or episode, merely for the sake of preserving the effect of the
character's full reality." And thus the story is to be subdued to the
service of the climax as the body of man to his brain. But what these
writers upon the short story do not tell us is that efficiency of this order
works backward as well as forward. If means are to correspond with
ends, why then ends must be adjusted to means. Not only must the
devices of the story- teller be directed with sincerity toward the
tremendous effect he wishes to make with his climax upon you and me,
his readers; but the interesting life which it is or should be his purpose
to write about for our delectation must be maneuvered, or must be
chosen or rejected, not according to the limitation which small space
imposes, but with its suitability to the "formula" in mind. In brief, if we
are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of life and no other must
be put into the short-story hopper. Nothing which cannot be told

rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. If
it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in married life, the action
must be speeded beyond probability, like a film in the moving pictures,
before it is ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of
disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and life flattening out
together, some sharp climax must be provided nevertheless, because
that is the only way in which to tell a story. Indeed it is easy to see the
dangers which arise from sacrificing truth to a formula in the interests
of efficiency.
This is the limitation by form; the limitation by subject is quite as
annoying. American writers from Poe down have been fertile in plots.
Especially since O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary master,
ingenuity, inventiveness, cleverness in its American sense, have been
squandered upon the short story. But plots do not make variety.
Themes make variety. Human nature regarded in its multitudinous
phases makes variety. There are only a few themes in current American
short stories,--the sentimental theme from which breed ten thousand
narratives; the theme of intellectual analysis and of moral psychology
favored by the "literary" magazines; the "big-business" theme; the
theme of American effrontery; the social-contrast theme; the theme of
successful crime. Add a few more, and you will have them all. Read a
hundred examples, and you will see how infallibly the authors-- always
excepting our few masters--limit themselves to conventional aspects of
even these conventional themes. Reflect, and you will see how the
first--the theme of sentiment--has overflowed its banks and washed
over all the rest, so that, whatever else a story may be, it must
somewhere, somehow, make the honest American heart beat more
softly.
There is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the American public,
which I do not propose to neglect. But here too we are in the grip of the
"formula," of the idea that there is only one way to construct a short
story--a swift succession of climaxes rising precipitously to a giddy
eminence. For the formula is rigid, not plastic as life is plastic. It fails
to grasp innumerable stories which break the surface of American life
day by day and disappear uncaught. Stories of quiet homely life, events
significant for themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations
that end in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The

method which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety.
Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrowness of this
American