Variations in prose: collective short stories and a novella

Usually filled with cryptic and uniquely deployed motifs, personages, and symbols , tales are frequently fully understood only by members of the particular culture to which they belong. Simply, tales are intracultural. Seldom created to address an outside culture, a tale is a medium through which a culture speaks to itself and thus perpetuates its own values and stabilizes its own identity.

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The old speak to the young through tales. The sketch, by contrast, is intercultural, depicting some phenomenon of one culture for the benefit or pleasure of a second culture. Factual and journalistic, in essence the sketch is generally more analytic or descriptive and less narrative or dramatic than the tale. Moreover, the sketch by nature is suggestive , incomplete; the tale is often hyperbolic , overstated. The primary mode of the sketch is written; that of the tale, spoken. This difference alone accounts for their strikingly different effects.

The sketch writer can have, or pretend to have, his eye on his subject. The tale, recounted at court or campfire—or at some place similarly removed in time from the event—is nearly always a re-creation of the past. The sketch writer is more an agent of space , bringing an aspect of one culture to the attention of a second. It is only a slight oversimplification to suggest that the tale was the only kind of short fiction until the 16th century, when a rising middle class interest in social realism on the one hand and in exotic lands on the other put a premium on sketches of subcultures and foreign regions.

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Nikolay Gogol , Hawthorne, E. Each writer worked in his own way, but the general effect was to mitigate some of the fantasy and stultifying conventionality of the tale and, at the same time, to liberate the sketch from its bondage to strict factuality. The modern short story, then, ranges between the highly imaginative tale and the photographic sketch and in some ways draws on both.

The short stories of Ernest Hemingway , for example, may often gain their force from an exploitation of traditional mythic symbols water, fish, groin wounds , but they are more closely related to the sketch than to the tale. Indeed, Hemingway was able at times to submit his apparently factual stories as newspaper copy. Faulkner seldom seems to understate, and his stories carry a heavy flavour of the past. Both his language and his subject matter are rich in traditional material. A Southerner might well suspect that only a reader steeped in sympathetic knowledge of the traditional South could fully understand Faulkner.

Faulkner may seem, at times, to be a Southerner speaking to and for Southerners. Whether or not one sees the modern short story as a fusion of sketch and tale, it is hardly disputable that today the short story is a distinct and autonomous , though still developing, genre. The evolution of the short story first began before humans could write. To aid in constructing and memorizing tales, the early storyteller often relied on stock phrases, fixed rhythms, and rhyme.

Consequently, many of the oldest narratives in the world, such as the ancient Babylonian tale the Epic of Gilgamesh , are in verse. Indeed, most major stories from the ancient Middle East were in verse: Those tales were inscribed in cuneiform on clay during the 2nd millennium bce. The earliest tales extant from Egypt were composed on papyrus at a comparable date. The ancient Egyptians seem to have written their narratives largely in prose, apparently reserving verse for their religious hymns and working songs.

Of all the early Egyptian tales, most of which are baldly didactic , this story is perhaps the richest in folk motifs and the most intricate in plot. The earliest tales from India are not as old as those from Egypt and the Middle East. Perhaps more interesting as stories are the later tales in the Pali language , the Jataka s.

Although these tales have a religious frame that attempts to recast them as Buddhist ethical teachings, their actual concern is generally with secular behaviour and practical wisdom. Another, nearly contemporaneous collection of Indian tales, the Panchatantra c. Most of those tales come from much older material, and they vary from the fantastic story of a transformed swan to a more probable tale of a loyal but misunderstood servant.

During the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries bce , the sophisticated narratives that are now a part of the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha were first written down. The book of Tobit displays an unprecedented sense of ironic humour; Judith creates an unrelenting and suspenseful tension as it builds to its bloody climax; the story of Susanna , the most compact and least fantastic in the Apocrypha, develops a three-sided conflict involving the innocent beauty of Susanna, the lechery of the elders, and the triumphant wisdom of Daniel.

The books of Ruth , Esther , and Jonah hardly need mentioning to those familiar with biblical literature: Nearly all of the ancient tales, whether from Israel, India, Egypt, or the Middle East , were fundamentally didactic. Some of those ancient stories preached by presenting an ideal for readers to imitate. The early Greeks contributed greatly to the scope and art of short fiction. Apollodorus of Athens compiled a handbook of epitomes , or abstracts, of those tales around the 2nd century bce , but the tales themselves are no longer extant in their original form. They appear, though somewhat transformed, in the longer poetical works of Hesiod , Homer , and the tragedians.

Analysis of the genre

The Cyropaedia also contains other narrative interpolations: Moreover, the Greeks are usually credited with originating the romance , a long form of prose fiction with stylized plots of love, catastrophe , and reunion. The early Greek romances frequently took shape as a series of short tales. The Love Romances of Parthenius of Nicaea , who wrote during the reign of Augustus Caesar , is a collection of 36 prose stories of unhappy lovers.

The Milesian Tales no longer extant was an extremely popular collection of erotic and ribald stories composed by Aristides of Miletus in the 2nd century bce and translated almost immediately into Latin. As the variety of these short narratives suggests, the Greeks were less insistent than earlier cultures that short fiction be predominantly didactic. By comparison the contribution of the Romans to short narrative was small. The other major fictional narratives to come out of Rome are novel-length works by Gaius Petronius Arbiter Satyricon , 1st century ce and Lucius Apuleius The Golden Ass , 2nd century ce.

Like Ovid those men used potential short story material as episodes within a larger whole. The Roman love of rhetoric , it seems, encouraged the development of longer and more comprehensive forms of expression. Regardless, the trend away from didacticism inaugurated by the Greeks was not reversed.

The Middle Ages in Europe was a time of the proliferation, though not necessarily the refinement, of short narratives. The short tale became an important means of diversion and amusement. From the medieval era to the Renaissance, various cultures adopted short fiction for their own purposes. Even the aggressive, grim spirit of the invading Germanic barbarians was amenable to expression in short prose.

The myths and sagas extant in Scandinavia and Iceland indicate the kinds of bleak and violent tales the invaders took with them into southern Europe. In contrast, the romantic imagination and high spirits of the Celts remained manifest in their tales. Wherever they appeared—in Ireland, Wales, or Brittany—stories steeped in magic and splendour also appeared.

FICTION, ii(b) – Encyclopaedia Iranica

This spirit, easily recognized in such Irish mythological tales as Longes mac n-Uislenn probably 9th-century , infused the chivalric romances that developed somewhat later on the Continent. Many, but not all, of the romances are too long to be considered short stories. The latter was gifted as a creator of the short narrative poems known as the Breton lays.

Only occasionally did a popular short romance like Aucassin and Nicolette 13th century fail to address any of the three Matters. Also widely respected was the exemplum , a short didactic tale usually intended to dramatize or otherwise inspire model behaviour. Of all the exempla, the best known in the 11th and 12th centuries were the lives of the saints, some of which are extant.

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Among the common people of the late Middle Ages there appeared a literary movement counter to that of the romance and exemplum. All were important as short narratives, but perhaps the most intriguing of the three are the fabliaux. First appearing around the middle of the 12th century, fabliaux remained popular for years, attracting the attention of Boccaccio and Chaucer.

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Heston as Isfahan is Half the World: Memories of a Persian Boyhood , Princeton, l , a bildungsroman in two volumes. The early social novel, with its preoccupation with sensationalist plots and its lack of interest in stylistic innovations, was discarded by a new generation of writers who had begun to experiment with new techniques in the years before the advent of the Second World War.



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His writings cover many genres. Costello as The Blind Owl , London, ; tr.

Short story

Widely differing in their representations of life and humanity, taken together they offer a kaleidoscopic view of the s and s. It is narrated in the first person-singular by a traditional artist obsessively engaged in painting the slim figure of an ethereal woman, whose haunting image he paints on pen-boxes. In the second part she is transformed into the woman he marries, and whom he ultimately murders.

Throughout the novel, scenes and events reflect and echo each other, time does not follow a linear progression and dream and reality remain intertwined. The very ambivalence of the novel gives it a haunting effect that remains with the reader long afterwards.



It has been translated into many languages and has generated a considerable amount of literary criticism. His influence can be detected on later writings of the same genre Raffat, pp. A Chicago Anthology , Chicago, , pp. The s marked a rare and short-lived period of freedom of expression in Persia when political and literary activity, especially of a polemical nature, flourished. This period also witnessed gradual changes and shifts in literary and linguistic taste and preferences. English replaced French as the foreign language of choice.

Writers from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries became increasingly popular. The diversity of literary trends was well manifested in the First Congress of Iranian Writers, sponsored by the Perso-Soviet Society Tehran, , which, although preponderantly leftist in sympathy, allowed opposing views to be heard and produced a level of sophistication in its often vigorous debates which was not equalled for some years to come.

It was a period of tumultuous literary and cultural transformations. Works of form-conscious American novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, were translated into Persian and much admired. French writers, especially Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, were also influential, particularly as both wrote on the relationship between politics, philosophy, and literature, although from differing stances.

The first part of the period, , in which a new literary generation, whose political ideals had been betrayed, came of age, is generally remembered as a decade of disappointments and regrets. The aggressive social criticism of earlier years was replaced by self criticism and introvert romanticism. The period as a whole was marked by two dominant and conflicting literary trends: Modernist writers, discarding the confines of social realism, prominent in populist oeuvres, strove to redefine the then current concepts of commitment in literature. He was the first writer of this generation to use the full potential of the dialogue as a narrative technique.

An Anthology , Delmar, N. He experimented with various types of narrative: In addition tos short stories, he wrote three novels: Ghanoonparvar as By the Pen , Austin, Tex. Against a vivid panorama of a provincial town, the novel describes the life of a middle-aged baker who falls in love with an exciting young woman and takes her as his second wife. The triangular relationship, and the whole range of human passion, frailty, suffering, and even mischief that it generates, is described with much compassion and some psychological insight.

Sketch story

The biblical theme of the novel is couched in an appropriately poised and sober poetical language. It dealt with the waning power of traditional landowners against increasing state control. Meanwhile the number of writers proliferated. The palpable sense of loss and failure of the earlier years of the period, gave way to a positive drive to find the underlying causes of their present state and possible ways of its amelioration.