Journal Article

\THE LIE IS THAT IT'S ONE OR THE OTHER\: EXTRACTING \FOREVER OVERHEAD\ AND \CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS\ FROM THE SHORT STORY CYCLE

Mayo, Rob

2019

Overview

\"4 Dunn and Morris's preferred term for the story cycle, \"composite novel,\" reflects the hybrid form's critical transcendence; \"in the pigeon house of genre the novel occupies a lofty perch, and any generic label that emphasizes 'story' rather than 'novel' roosts at a lower level,\" and so in turn works such as Winesburg, Ohio and Brief Interviews may be imagined as aspiring towards the \"lofty perch\" of the novel in the minds of many critics and readers.5 In his examination of the short story cycle as a phenomenon in twentieth-century US fiction, Rolf Lundén attributes this preference of (composite) novels over (mere) short fiction to the \"post-Kantian, Coleridgean ideal of esthetic organicism, so dominant in the nineteenth [century] and the first half of [the twentieth] century,\" as a result of which \"unity, coherence, and closure have been privileged at the expense of discontinuity, fragmentation, and openness. \"6 Lundén's invocation of Coleridgean organicism-which holds that \"[t]he form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form,\" and that in contrast \"[t]he organic form . . . is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within\"-raises the issue of authorial design.7 Such questions have typically been considered misguided in contemporary literary criticism, especially since Wimsatt and Beardsley's declaration in 1946 that \"the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. In order of decreasing unity/coherence, these four subcategories of short story composite are: the cycle, which is \"basically organized cyclically-where in the last story there is a final resolution and a return to a beginning\" (examples include The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty and The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder); the sequence, in which there is a principle of sequential order, but without the cycle's \"strong sense of unity and closure\" (Lundén suggests Faulkner's The Unvanquished and On The Line by Harvey Swados as examples); the cluster, which exhibits \"a fairly high degree of indeterminacy\" and in which \"the interconnections between the stories are not obvious, but will have to be constructed by the reader, often with a constricting result . . . discontinuity and fragmentation emerge as the by far more characteristic features\" (e.g. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway); and the novella, which (as distinct from the synonymous literary form which one might assign to \"Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way\") features disparate stories held together by a framing device (the most famous example of this is Winesburg Ohio, but Lundén also includes Lost in the Funhouse and A Night at the Movies in this category, by virtue of \"extradiegetic devices\" such as Barth's foreword and Coover's \"simulated offering of a movie house\").11 Although arguably not as developed as Lundén's categorical framework, the theories of cycles offered by Reid and by Dunn and Morris are univocal on the importance of \"threading\" between stories, connections formed by \"organizing principles\" such as \"characters, settings, [and] leitmotifs. \"14 The most obvious claim that Brief Interviews may make to status as a cycle is the eponymous series, which lacks any connecting characters or settings but features consistent formal features such as the provision of a date and location at the beginning of each interview and the use of what Wallace describes as \"a journalistic capital 'Q'\" in place of the interviewer's (or interviewers') questions.15 In the same discussion Wallace says that the interviews are \"conducted by a female,\" suggesting that the voice concealed by the \"Q\"s is the same one in each interview, and in a separate conversation with

• Publisher: International David Foster Wallace Society
• Subject: American literature / Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941) / Coherence / Fiction / Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961) / Interviews / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary language / Motion pictures / Novellas / Novels / Short stories / Wallace, David Foster / Welty, Eudora (1909-2001)