Short Stories: What is new about From Under Gogol's Nose - which brings together Jack Harte's previous two short-story collections - is a preface offering a consideration of the current state of the short story in Ireland.
The gist of Harte's thesis is that the short story is a disappearing form, that it has become merely a stepping stone for contemporary Irish writers on their move toward the supposedly more fulfilling - and definitely lucrative - form that is the novel. Along the way, a broadside is directed at Frank O'Connor's limited promotion of realism as the proper basis of the modern Irish short story.
Harte wants the short story to be itself, not a "nearly" novel but a form that can be appraised and enjoyed on its own terms. Of course, one of the real dangers for any writer constructing an argument as Harte does is that it sets up a standard, however notional, by which his own efforts will be judged.
Certainly, Harte distrusts realism, be it O'Connor's Cork version or any other variety. His stories operate at the level of allegory, with the general thrust in many of them warning the reader against the evils attaching to the drudgery of conventional life. Reality is far away in stories that move from Hades and the underworld to a "Retirement colony" and Dublin's Leeson Street. Some are hardly stories at all and are content instead to generate a mood and an atmosphere. The veneer of the mythological is what is hoped for, but the heavy didactic tone at times places a strain on the technique, which can become obvious and laboured. The best of the stories - for instance 'Murphy in the Underworld', 'Requiem for Johnny Murtagh' and 'Bike' - avoid such problems, allowing a space for the reader to enter into the equation.
But is the short story under threat, as Harte believes? Perhaps, perhaps not. If it is, then it will fade and disappear, no matter how much we may lament the fact: writers use the forms and the genres appropriate to their time and their predicament. Maybe it would be more productive to get beyond an oppositional framework that starkly divides the prose world into either the short story or the novel. Nikolai Gogol, under whose auspicious nose this collection is written, as well as producing magnificent short stories that moved seamlessly between the real and the fantastic, wrote a great comic novel. And, of course, many Irish writers - James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne - have moved between the two, using one or the other as the need arose, and have been the more complete artists for it. Size shouldn't matter; so let us celebrate all prose fiction, especially if it is good.
From Under Gogol's Nose by Jack Harte Scotus Press, 207pp. NPG