[This semester,
as part of my Ethnic
American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The
House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three
works, as well as a few other examples of this complex
literary genre.]
On two distinct
models for the genre from a century prior to its rise to prominence.
Short story
cycles became a prominent part of the American literary lansdscape in the
postmodern period of the late 20th century, as the 1980s and 90s
publication dates of the subjects of the week’s other posts illustrate.
Shifting chronologies and structures, multiple narrators and perspectives,
challenging demands placed on readers who are required to assemble fragmentary
and even contradictory collections of texts—the genre embodies many of the most
central elements of postmodern
fiction, as well as the kinds of philosophies and identities associated
with the postmodern period more broadly. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, in an article
on another postmodern literary device (the novelist-narrator), there’s also
significant value in crossing period boundaries and considering literary forms
as they have existed in multiple moments. And in this case, two late 19th
century short story cycles have a great deal to offer as models of the genre.
In Sarah Orne
Jewett’s The Country of the
Pointed Firs (1896), the unnamed narrator travels to Dunnet Landing, a
small, isolated fishing village on the coast of Maine, to spend a secluded
summer in a place that time seems to have forgotten. Although we learn at the
outset that she has been there before and knows some of its inhabitants, that
fact is perhaps the only concrete details we will ever learn about the
narrator, who serves mostly as an observer of the town’s places and people and
an occasion for them to share their own voices and stories. Indeed, it is only
in the framing stories (describing her arrival and departure, respectively)
that the narrator is a focal point at all; the others, in classic
local color fashion, center on distinct settings and communities within
this unique and perfectly drawn little world. Without overstating a contrast
based on one work in particular, I’d say that there’s something to be made of
the fact that in this late 19th century short story cycle (compared
to the week’s 20th century examples) the first-person narrator is
both an outsider to the central setting and experiences and a writer who
observes and transcribes much more than she participates or shares in them.
A similar
dynamic can be found—if with a key distinction—in Charles Chesnutt’s The
Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899). Like Jewett’s narrator,
Chesnutt’s narrator John travels (this time with his wife Annie, whose ill
health has necessitated the move) to a complex new setting, in this case a
former slave plantation during the post-war Reconstruction era. And as in
Jewett, John serves mostly as a frame through which one of that place’s
inhabitants, the ex-slave storyteller Uncle Julius, shares his own voice and
stories, the titular conjure tales that capture (in Julius’ dense, carefully
constructed dialect
voice) supernatural yet realistic Southern histories of slavery and race. Yet
while Jewett located her narrator most fully in the book’s overall frames (its
opening and closing stories), Chesnutt makes John and Annie (and their
interactions with Julius) the frames of each story, keeping them more
consistently present throughout the book and linking his local color and
historical fictions to these contemporary, outsider characters. As a result, Conjure not only portrays the past but
also and most importantly connects it to an evolving present, a multi-layered
non-chronological structure that foreshadows some key aspects of late 20th
century short story cycles.
April recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?
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