"The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield (1922)
"After the Storm" by Ernest Hemingway (1933)
"Uncle Willy" by William Faulkner (1935)
"The South" by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)
"The Swimmer" by John Cheever (1964) (read in The New Yorker Fiction Podcast)
"A Shower of Gold" by Donald Barthelme (1964)
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)
"Cathedral" by Raymond Carver (1981)
"Where I'm Likely to Find It" by Haruki Murakami (The New Yorker May 2, 2005)
Stories we've read in the past in which you might recognize some of the modern & postmodern characteristics: "The Ceiling" by Kevin Brockmeier; "The Gospel According to Mark" by Borges; "Symbols and Signs" by Vladimir Nabokov.
Relevant reading about the evolution of the short story in the modern & postmodern era:
"A Short History of the Short Story" by William Boyd
Prospect Magazine: July 2006
"Emergence of Faulkner the Southern Modernist" by Shin Monsu
List (pdf) of journal articles & criticism on some of our featured authors (articles not online).
And one more not online: Brown, Arthur A. "Raymond Carver and Postmodern Humanism." Critique Winter 32 (1990): 125+.
Excerpt from "Looking at Short Stories" by Eudora Welty (from On Writing), an analysis of Chekhov's "The Darling":
Clearly, the fact that stories have plots in common is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes. Plots are, indeed, what the story writer sees with, and so do we as we read. The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go. To learn that character is a more awe- inspiring fish and (in a short story, though not, I think, in a novel) one some degrees deeper down than situation, we have only to read Chekhov. What constitutes the reality of his characters is what they reveal to us. And the possibility that they may indeed reveal everything is what makes fictional characters differ so greatly from us in real life; yet isn't it strange that they don't really seem to differ? This is one clue to the extraordinary magnitude of character in fiction. Characters in the plot connect us with the vastness of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable. This is their role. What happens to them is what they have been put here to show.
In his story "The Darling," the darling's first husband, the theatre manager, dies suddenly because of the darling's sweet passivity; this is the causality of fiction. In everyday or real life he might have held on to his health for years. But under Chekhov's hand he is living and dying in dependence on, and in revelation of, Olenka's character. He can only last a page and a half. Only by force of the story’s circumstance is he here at all; Olenka took him up to begin with because he lived next door.
Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was always fond of someone, and could not exist without lov- ing. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt, who used to come every other year from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes, not half bad,” and smiled too, while lady-visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, “You darling!”
Kukin proposes and they are married.
And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hand and said “You darling!” . . . And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behavior of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor’s office to set things right . . .
And when Kukin dies, Olenka’s cry of heartbreak is this: “Vanitchka, my precious, my darling! Why did I ever meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor brokenhearted Olenka is all alone without you!”
With variations the pattern is repeated, and we are made to feel it as plot, aware of its clear open stress, the variations all springing from Chekhov’s boundless and minute perception of character. The timber-merchant, another neighbor, is the one who walks home from the funeral with Olenka. The outcome follows tenderly, is only natural. After three days, he calls. “He did not stay long, only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka loved him--loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever.”
Olenka and Pustovalov get along very well together when they are married.
“Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent,” she would say to her customers and friends . . . “And the freight!” she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror, “the freight!” . . . It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages; and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of words such as “post,” “beam,” “pole,” “batten,” “lath,” “plank,” and the like.
Even in her dreams Olenka is in the timber business, dreaming of “perfect mountains of planks and boards,” and cries out in her sleep, so that Pustovalov says to her tenderly, “Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!” But the timber merchant inevitably goes out in the timber yard one day without his cap on; he catches cold and dies, to leave Olenka a widow once more. “I’ve nobody, now you’ve left me, my darling,” she sobs after the funeral. “How can I live without you?”
And the timber merchant is succeeded by a veterinary surgeon--who gets transferred to Siberia. But the plot is not repetition--it is direction. The love which Olenka bears to whatever is nearest her reaches its final and, we discover, its truest mold in maternalism: for there it is most naturally innocent of anything but formless, thoughtless, blameless embracing; the true innocence is in never perceiv- ing. Only mother love could endure in a pursuit of such blind regard, caring so little for the reality of either life involved so long as love wraps them together, Chekhov tells us?unpretentiously, as he tells everything, and with the simplest of concluding episodes. Olenka?s character is seen purely then for what it is: limpid reflection, mindless and purposeless regard, love that falls like the sun and rain on all alike, vacant when there is nothing to reflect.
We know this because, before her final chance to love, Olenka is shown to us truly alone:
[She] got thinner and plainer; and when people met her in the street they did not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about . . . And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinions about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason; that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood.
The answer is Sasha, the ten-year-old son of the veterinary surgeon, an unexpected blessing from Siberia’a schoolchild. The veterinarian has another wife now, but this no longer matters. “Olenka, with arms akimbo, walked about the yard giving directions. Her face was beaming, and she was brisk and alert, as though she had waked from a long sleep . . . ‘An island is a piece of land entirely surrounded by water,’ Sasha reads aloud. ‘An island is a piece of land,’ she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction, after so many years of silence and dearth of ideas.” She would follow Sasha halfway to school, until he told her to go back. She would go to bed thinking blissfully of Sasha, “who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep, “I’ll give it to you! Get away! Shut up!?”
The darling herself is the story; all else is sacrificed to her; deaths and departures are perfunctory and to be expected. The last words of the story are the child’s and a protest, but they are delivered in sleep, as indeed protest to the darlings of this world will always be--out of inward and silent rebellion alone, as this master makes plain.
It is when the plot, whatever it is, is nearest to becoming the same thing on the outside as it is deep inside, that it is purest. When it is identifiable in every motion and progression of its own with the motions and progressions of the story’s feeling and its intensity, then this is plot put to its highest use.
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