Rediscovering the Birth of Genre Fiction with Michael Gorra
In his new book, The Storytellers, Michael Gorra offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing the short story across languages and decades, Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation. He also examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences.
The Storytellers offers a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more.
Read on for a Q&A with Gorra about his approach to researching this large body of work and how the birth of the short story also reveals the origins of genre fiction.
Much has been written about the nineteenth century novel—less so, nineteenth century short fiction. What was your motivation for writing The Storytellers and digging into the origins of the modern short story?
I started to teach this material precisely because I didn’t know much about it. I had a sense that there was a lot of great stuff out there, a lot of great stories that I didn’t really know, just a set of authors’ names beyond a few anthology pieces like Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” But I also had the sense that they weren’t much like most 20th-century stories, at least not those in English, the tight, compact, elliptical, and above all realist stories written by people like Joyce or Mansfield or Hemingway, and then their heirs. So I started reading, and for me the best way to learn something is to teach it. Yet when I started to teach a class on the 19th-century story, I found that there wasn’t a lot of critical material out there to help me, not least that would give a synthetic view of it. Books on the American short story, or the German, but nothing that pulled it together. I decided to t fill the gap…
That’s one answer. Another is that as soon as I start to teach something I start to think about how I might write about it. Sometimes that takes me somewhere, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it did. The crucial thing is that the book got its start in the classroom.
Much of the short fiction you study in the book might today be called “genre fiction”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic tales, for example. Today, short stories have a much more “literary” connotation. Can you walk us through how this shift occurred?
The crucial word in that question is “today.” The idea of genre fiction, and certainly of genre writers, didn’t exist in its present form for much of the 19th century. Everybody wrote ghost stories, for example; everybody drew on the fantastic, and they did so unselfconsciously, without having any sense that there was a hierarchy, that there were barriers between one kind of writing and another. Indeed, the subtlest presentations of the inner life often took the form of what might now be labeled as genre. I’m thinking of Gogol’s “The Nose,” or E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” let alone the ghostly tales of James. Poe’s own kind of fiction was associated first of all with the Scottish magazine Blackwood’s, which specialized in what were called “tales of effect,” things meant to startle, and which he parodied on the way to becoming himself. But his stories were above all his, rather than being assimilated to an idea of genre as we think of it now.
That began to change near the end of the century. Some of that is doubtless a spillover from the realist novel; some too from the French idea that fiction should offer a “slice of life,” an apparently unshaped account of daily existence. That’s how Guy de Maupassant described the work of Ivan Turgenev, and of course it also fits the slightly later Anton Chekhov. But the real cause here is the growth of mass-market magazines–the best example is The Strand, in Britain, where the Holmes stories were first published. Their circulation dwarfed that of magazines like the Atlantic or Harper’s, and they relied on giving their readers something that would keep them coming back. Something that was at once new and familiar. The Holmes stories had that in spades–the same main characters, and the same basic narrative structure, but a different adventure each month. And at that point the narrative conventions began to harden, and what we now call genre fiction started to hive off from what we call “literary.” Or you could say that all the weird stuff so characteristic of writers like Hoffmann, but also of Nathaniel Hawthorne, began to move into genre fiction, and that the psychological acuity that one also finds in Hoffmann and Hawthorne became the property of a putative “mainstream.”
By the 1920s and 30s all that was firmly established in American writing especially. The genre pulps on the one hand; the little magazines, the Atlantic, and eventually The New Yorker on the other. But this sense of fiercely policed generic borders may be a particular feature of literature in English. And Kafka would be my counter-example.
With such a vast canon of short fiction to draw from, how did you decide which stories and writers to highlight? Are there any favorite tales that you don’t discuss in the book?
So many! James said that you can only do what seems to hang together. This book is full of digressions, but there were times when I could see that certain digressions would take me too far away from what I thought should come next. I worried about making the beginning of a chapter hang with its end, and so I had a lot of mental outtakes. I had to sacrifice a discussion of the French writer Prosper Mérimée’s “Carmen,” for example, and also his supernatural tale “The Venus of Ille.” Joseph Conrad’s early story, “Amy Foster,” fits so well the idea that the short story deals with characters on the social margins of their world, and then I did very little with James himself, though I’ve written a lot about him before. What I most regret is skimping on Rudyard Kipling. I touch on just one of his stories, and yet he really should have a chapter here. But the book was getting long, and it would indeed have seemed a digression. “The Man Who Would Be King” is an utter marvel. It’s not nearly as certain about imperialism as readers once took it to be, and as a piece of storytelling it is as formally intricate, and as fascinating, as anything in its century.
What’s the best work of contemporary short fiction that you’ve read lately?
I’ll get no prizes for originality if I say it’s the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses, but that’s what it is. Eerie, Gothic, political stories that speak to a society’s fears. I also just read a wonderful new book of linked stories by the American writer Lydia Millet called Atavists. They’re set in a prosperous Southern California suburb, and are sort of a sunny Winesburg, Ohio. Sunny, in both the weather and otherwise, until all of a sudden they aren’t.
Where will your research and writing take you next?
I’ve always done a lot of reviewing, and in between books tend to do a little more—I like the intensive reading it requires, throwing yourself into a subject and getting it up quickly. So there’s that, but I also just retired from the teaching part of my life and want to breathe a bit. For a long while now it seems I’ve known what my next book would be well before I finished the old one. This time I don’t, and I sort of like the fact that I haven’t committed myself to anything. But there are a lot of ideas for essays kicking around in my head. Patrick Modiano as a guide to the non-touristy parts of Paris–in company with the Maigret novels of Georges Simenon? Something maybe on Anna Karenina, and the impossible demands its title character makes on both her own life and the world itself, her rage that one cannot survive on love alone? We’ll see.
Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Smith College. He is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Gorra is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He has received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Nona Balakian Citation of the National Book Critics Circle for his work as a reviewer.
The Storytellers is available now. Save 30% when you use the code UCPNEW at checkout on our site.