SHORT STORIES: DECLAN KIBERDreviews
The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Edited with an introduction by Anne Enright, Granta, 442pp, £25
ARE THERE REALLY such things as “short stories”? Or are there just stories of varying length? In oral cultures a tale could last for five minutes or for the whole of a night.
With the onset of print all that changed. It was argued that there wassuch a thing as a short story and that, moreover, this was a quintessentially Irish form. At least two of the authors whose work is included in this vivid and enthralling collection attempted to define the mutation.
Frank O’Connor asserted that short stories flourished wherever a vibrant oral culture was challenged by a development of a written literary tradition – the American Midwest of Twain, the Russia of Gogol, the rural France of Maupassant and, of course, revival Ireland. The genre often took for theme that very clash between old orthodoxies and new pieties, reflecting the disturbances of a culture as it shed ancient, often stifling traditions. There is an echo of that thesis on the Granta dust jacket, which promises an anthology that “traces the great tradition through decades of social change”.
Yet O’Connor also believed that the short story was ultimately asocial: it dealt with the “little man” as anti-hero in a “submerged population group”. If the novel treated a made society, the short story described rather a society in the making, focusing in Ireland on the Os and Macs whose lonely escapades on the fringes of a colonial world might one day make a society and a multivalent novel possible. Sean O’Faolain seemed to agree. In his own earlier study he called the short story “an emphatically personal exposition”, the work of individualists whose world was still unconventionalised. But he worried that even the independent Ireland of the mid 20th century as yet lacked “adequacy” – that is, the achieved social density – for a truly resonant novel.
Whenever Corkmen agree with one another, one should be sceptical. Coded into these analyses was much brilliant thinking but also an unfortunate implication: that the short story was prentice work, a transitional form suitable to test young writers before they moved onwards and upwards to the novel and, by implication, to a more layered, settled and complete society. You could write interesting stories to fill a page in the Irish Pressor a half-hour on Radio Éireann, or even a slot in the New Yorker, but somehow the novel was where the real action would lie. By the 1980s, however, many authors had grown tired of the very notion of an inherently Irish short story: in a trenchant Hiberniaessay Alan Titley called its cult a "disease".
Perhaps O'Connor and O'Faolain had been naive in trying to define the genre at all. Enright recognises that every writer selects from human life and the shorter narrative needs to be poetic and perfectly pitched: it cannot afford the longueurs that may sully even the finest novels. It is more formally exacting to write Night in Tunisia(included here) than The Past, The Trout(included) than And Again?, Lilacs(included) than The House in Clewe Street. It might even be said, on the evidence here, that some of our finest younger novelists have now "graduated" to the shorter form.
The early theorists of the short story saw it as detached from society or history. The teller might describe nothing more portentous than a hen crossing the road, but it was the way the thing was done (often in first-person narrative) that made the telling memorable, that raised it to the dignity of the symbolic. Joyce rendered the everyday extraordinary by applying this method, conferring on trivial gestures the quality of an epiphany. If Dublinersconnected those epiphanies in such a fashion as to become almost a novel, Ulysseswas a reversal of that process, being a novel that seemed constantly to disintegrate into a series of stories and episodes.
That is why Enright correctly warns against putting the stories that she has assembled (with advice from her mother and sister) into boxes. She knows as a professional artist that there is little money in the genre, whose works are written more for the pleasure of their authors than for any formula-driven market.
She understands, also, that the new Ireland has its own outsiders and submerged population groups (a rich subject for Roddy Doyle, as for Jennifer Cornell or Claire Keegan). She senses that all stories, whatever their length, give events a certain shape and offer people an illusion of control, even as they embody truths beyond final explanation.
Her selection, for honourable reasons, foregrounds many current practitioners (Kevin Barry, Keith Ridgway, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Philip Ó Ceallaigh), as well as canonical figures from Bowen, O’Connor and O’Faolain to Lavin, McGahern and Neil Jordan. Rather tentatively, but deftly too, she identifies a quality of personal utterance in each story, registering a moment in life when “something has changed”.
Perhaps O’Connor was shrewd. “The form of the novel is given by the length,” he wrote; “In the short story the length is given by the form. There is simply no criterion of the length of the short story other than that provided by the material itself.”
Given those constraints, Enright has assembled a collection notable for its emotional range, its openness to many voices (not all lonely) and its willingness to reflect current realities. There is no conclusive formula linking such disparate narratives, no slick exploitation of Irishness, but rather a rich interplay of themes that capture a world in transition.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. His most recent book is Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living(Faber)