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A short history of the short story

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David Davidar
David DavidarMay 13, 2015 | 11:59

A short history of the short story

RK Narayan, one of the world’s greatest writers, tells an amusing story about creative writing in general, and the short story in particular. He writes: "Once I was present at a lecture on creative writing. The lecturer began with: 'All writing may be divided into two groups — good writing and bad writing. Good books come out of good writing while bad writing produces failures.' When touching on the subject of the short story, the lecturer said: 'A short story must be short and have a story'. At this point I left unobtrusively, sympathising with the man’s predicament."

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The story is amusing but when you come down to it, the short story is devilishly difficult to define if you exclude length as a criterion. Dictionary definitions are banal in the extreme. Here is one example: "A story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel."

If you were taking a creative writing class, your instructor might tell you that your story would need to have the following elements — exposition (the setting up of the story, its backdrop, main characters etc), conflict, plot, theme, climax and so on. If s/he was of a Chekhovian bent of mind, s/he might tell you to write a "slice of life" story that was relatively loosely constructed when compared to tightly plotted stories that hinged on events and turning points.

There are many other categories that short stories are classified under but these do not need to detain us. Let us instead take a quick look at the origins of the modern short story, and how it spread around the world before speeding ahead to the modern Indian short story.

The short story began to flourish in several parts of the world at about the same time — the 19th century. The United States had great practitioners of the form, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe (who wrote an essay about short fiction that practically every creative writing course will point you to called "The Philosophy of Composition"); France had prolific and excellent story writers such as Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet; in Germany the brothers Grimm published their retold fairytales; and in England, writers like Thomas Hardy, HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle put out not just literary stories but some of the first modern detective stories and science fiction tales. Modern European and American short fiction followed in the wake of books by writers like Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales was published in the 14th century) and Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron) as well as the great epics of European classical literature like The Iliad and The Odyssey. The single greatest leap forward in the evolution of the short story in the 19th century is attributed to a writer many think of as the father of the modern short story, Anton Chekhov. Chekhov’s precursors themselves were among the best modern writers of fiction the world has ever seen, notably Nikolai Gogol, whom the novelist and essayist Vladimir Nabokov considered "the greatest artist Russia has yet produced". One of Gogol’s contemporaries, the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, went further when he famously proclaimed: "We all come out from Gogol’s The Overcoat."

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The British writer William Boyd is effusive in his praise of Chekhov. He writes in Prospect magazine:

"Why is Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) routinely and correctly described as the greatest short story writer ever? All answers to this question will seem inadequate but, to put it very simply, the fact is that Chekhov, in his mature stories of the 1890s, revolutionised the short story by transforming narrative. Chekhov saw and understood that life is godless, random and absurd, that all history is the history of unintended consequences... By abandoning the manipulated beginning-middle-and-end plot, by refusing to judge his characters, by not striving for a climax or seeking neat narrative resolution, Chekhov made his stories appear agonisingly, almost unbearably lifelike."

As the 19th century bled into the 20th century, the short story continued to flourish in every corner of the world, driven by increasing rates of literacy, the growth of literary magazines and supplements, especially in the Western world, the packaging and marketing of famous authors as superstars, and so on. It continued to morph into newer and newer forms as the decades went by.

In our country, the modern short story made an appearance almost simultaneously in several languages beginning naturally enough with Bengali. The writer and translator Ranga Rao credits the first modern short story to Poornachandra Chattopadhyay who published Madhumati in 1870 (Poornachandra’s older brother Bankim Chandra published Rajmohan’s Wife, the first Indian novel in English). Rabindranath Tagore soon established himself as one of Bengal’s finest short story writers; in Hindi, Munshi Premchand wrote hundreds of stories, many of which appeared in Hans, the literary magazine he published; and, in Oriya, the writer Fakir Mohan Senapati published some landmark stories.

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Throughout the 20th century, most of the major literatures in the land threw up great practitioners of the form — Saadat Hasan Manto in Urdu, Kalki in Tamil, Gurzada Appa Rao in Telugu, RK Narayan and Raja Rao in English, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer in Malayalam, and dozens of notable writers in every corner of the country. Their stories reflected their region, their upbringing, and their (often) cosmopolitan reading. A number of India’s pioneering short story writers had a common element in their stories — they were often extremely political in nature. It couldn’t have been otherwise in a country trying to free itself from a predatory and oppressive colonial power, while at the same time grappling with a huge variety of hellish social evils.

George Orwell writes eloquently about the power of writing that is overtly political: "I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally". Stories without humbug. Stories that are full of life. 

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(An excerpted version of the introduction from A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present, edited by David Davidar; Aleph; Rs 795.)

Last updated: July 15, 2015 | 13:04
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