Suspended Narratives: The Short Story and Temporality

Abstract

Genres provide conceptual framework for mediation (if not `solution') of intractable problems, method for rendering such problems intelligible. Michael McKeon, Origins of English Novel 20 In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie writes of a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get whole of life into his art. `Look at me,' he said before he killed himself, `I wanted to be miniaturist and I've got elephantiasis instead' (50). While short story as genre is not equivalent to miniature, this passage implicitly suggests nagging dilemma for short story enthusiasts: is there relationship between narrative length and aesthetic scope? If Rushdie's painter finds it necessary to create succession of ever-widening canvases in order for him to encapsulate the whole of life into his art, does this then mean that condensed narratives such as short story offer reduced spectrum of human experience when compared with more expanded forms?(1) In order to differentiate between techniques of narrative compression and those that accentuate elaboration and expansion, let us first turn to McKeon's observation that genres crystallize certain philosophical predicaments. One problem explicitly manifested by short story pertains to complexity of negotiating temporal experience through narrative. All narratives engage temporality in some way, but short fiction intimates how thoroughly our apprehension of historicity has been conditioned by sequential narrative forms such as novel. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of threshold, chronotope in which is essentially instantaneous ... and falls out of course of biographical (248) sets up useful paradigm for thinking about short fiction's tendency to accentuate single event, as opposed to novel's propensity to knit numerous events together in serial fashion. As we shall see, emphasizing isolated event over event-as-series has far-ranging hermeneutical repercussions. Suspending continuity, short story intimates that impulse to mold time into sequential narrative is often incommen-surate with our experience of temporality.(2) Many short stories depict situations where characters are perplexed by given set of circumstances, circumstances that seem to preclude mode of interpretation that will allow mediation back into what Bakhtin calls normal course of biographical time, where events are understood through their being integrated into series. As means of making my discussion more concrete, I would like to use William Sansom's short story The Vertical Ladder, as an illustration to describe short fiction's treatment of temporality. In this story, young man attempts to impress young woman by accepting dare to climb two ladders, 20-foot wooden ladder that leads to second, this one attached to gasworks that towers high above ground. Most of story pertains to character's increasing terror as he painfully works his way to summit. Close to apex of gasworks, after having taken with him young woman's handkerchief to affix onto rooftop, he sees that his companions have removed first ladder and are about to leave him alone. To his horror, at story's end, young man discovers that last rungs of ladder are missing, which was something that couldn't be perceived from ground. He can neither complete his quest, nor return to safety: Flegg stared dumbly, circling his head like lost animal ... then he jammed his legs into lower rungs and his arms past elbows to armpits in through top rungs and there he hung shivering and past knowing what more he could ever do ... (original ellipses; 422). Alone, paralyzed in present that seems endless, Flegg; might be said to embody manner in which short stories suspend single event from future and, often, past. …